was well or ill
founded.

But, while the opinion that a Dublin Parliament meant separation was
shared by many who had little else in common with the Ulster
Protestants, the latter stood alone in the intensity of their conviction
that "Home Rule meant Rome Rule." It has already been mentioned that it
is the "disloyalty" attributed rightly or wrongly to the Roman Catholics
as a body that has been, in recent times at all events, the mainspring
of Protestant distrust. But sectarian feeling, everywhere common between
rival creeds, is, of course, by no means absent. Englishmen find it hard
to understand what seems to them the bigoted and senseless animosity of
the rival faiths in Ireland. This is due to the astonishing shortness of
their memory in regard to their own history, and their very limited
outlook on the world outside their own island. If, without looking
further back in their history, they reflected that the "No Popery"
feeling in England in mid-Victorian days was scarcely less intense than
it is in Ulster to-day; or if they realised the extent to which
Gambetta's "Le clericalisme, voila l'ennemi" continues still to
influence public life in France, they might be less ready to censure the
Irish Protestant's dislike of priestly interference in affairs outside
the domain of faith and morals. It is indeed remarkable that
Nonconformists, especially in Wales, who within living memory have
displayed their own horror of the much milder form of sacerdotalism to
be found in the Anglican Church, have no sympathy apparently with the
Presbyterian and the Methodist in Ulster when the latter kick against
the encompassing pressure of the Roman Catholic priesthood, not in
educational matters alone, but in all the petty activities of every-day
life.

Whenever this aspect of the Home Rule controversy was emphasised
Englishmen asked what sort of persecution Irish Protestants had to fear
from a Parliament in Dublin, and appeared to think all such fear
illusory unless evidence could be adduced that the Holy Office was to be
set up at Maynooth, equipped with faggot and thumb-screw. Of persecution
of that sort there never has been, of course, any apprehension in
modern times. Individual Catholics and Protestants live side by side in
Ireland with fully as much amity as elsewhere, but whereas the Catholic
instinctively, and by upbringing, looks to the parish priest as his
director in all affairs of life, the Protestant dislikes and resist