of tenant
right in the teeth of the law, the inhuman system of cottier tenancy,
which was to last until 1881, became more and more firmly rooted in
other parts of Ireland.

None but a democratic Assembly could possibly have grappled with these
evils; nor is there any reason to suppose that in the existing condition
of Ireland a Protestant democratic Assembly, even if temporarily it
retained its sectarian character, would have grappled with them less
boldly and drastically than an Assembly composed of Catholics and
Protestants. The material interests of nineteen-twentieths of the people
were the same, while the education and intelligence belonged mainly to
the Protestants. Ulster tenants had as much need of good land laws as
other tenants. Tithes were as much disliked in the north as in the
south. The Established Church was the Church of a very small minority,
and its clergy, numbers of whom were absentees, were as unpopular as the
absentee landlords and the absentee office-holders and pensioners.

But with no redress, and, what is more important, no prospect of redress
for the primary ills of Ireland, the centrifugal forces of religion and
race had full scope for their baneful influence. And it was at the very
moment when tolerance was steadily gaining ground among all classes that
these spectres of ancient wrong were summoned up to destroy the good
work.

How did this come about? Let us remember once more that everything
hinged on Reform. Reform gained a little, but suffered far more, by its
association with the question of Catholic franchise, which was useless
without Reform, while it was the corollary of Reform. Nothing is more
remarkable than the growth of academic tolerance during this period,
doubtful and suspect as the motives sometimes were. It is true that the
great Relief Act of 1793, giving Catholics the vote and removing a
quantity of other disqualifications, would scarcely have been sanctioned
by the Parliamentary managers without the stern dictation of Pitt, whose
mind was strongly influenced by the violent anti-Catholic turn just
taken by the French Revolution; but, once sanctioned, it passed
rapidly, and was received with universal satisfaction in the country at
large. Without "Emancipation," that is, the permission to elect
Catholics to sit in Parliament and hold office, the franchise was
illusory and even harmful. In the counties the forty-shilling "freehold"
vote ("freehold" was an ironical misnome