is is a remarkable admission from an independent and unprejudiced
authority. He candidly declares they never understood the situation in
America. Neither was it understood in England, and the House of
Commons is the last place which tries to understand anything except
party or personal interests. There is just about as much freedom of
opinion and individual independence in Parliament as there could be in
a slave state. In Ireland, as I have said, outside Munster the truth
was never allowed to reach the people. Even the great national
movement which Mr William O'Brien re-created in the United Irish
League had almost ceased to function. It was gradually superseded by a
secret sectarian organisation which was the absolute antithesis of all
free development of democratic opinion and the complete negation of
liberty and fair play.

Up in the north of Ireland there existed an organisation of a secret
and sworn character which was an evil inheritance of an evil
generation. From the fact that the Ribbonmen used to meet in a shebeen
owned by one Molly Maguire, with the Irish adaptability for attaching
nicknames to anything short of what is sacred, they became known as
"Molly Maguires," or, for short, "the Mollies." In some ill-omened day
branches of the Ancient Order of Hibernians, which had seceded from
the American order of that name, began to interest themselves in
Ulster in political affairs. They called themselves the Board of Erin,
but they were, as I have said, more generally known as "the Mollies."
They were a narrowly sectarian institution and they had the almost
blasphemous rule that nobody but a Catholic frequenting the Sacraments
could remain a member. They had their own ritual and initiation
ceremony, founded on the Orange and Masonic precedents, and had their
secret signs and passwords. It is possible that they were at first
intended to be a Catholic protection society in Ulster at the end of
the eighteenth century to combat the aggressiveness and the fanatical
intolerance of the Orange Order, who sought nothing less than the
complete extermination of the Catholic tenantry. A Catholic Defence
organisation was a necessity in those circumstances, but when the
occasion that gave it justification and sanction had passed it would
have been better if it were likewise allowed to pass. Any organisation
which fans the flames of sectarianism and feeds the fires of religious
bigotry should have no place in a community which c