AN ULSTERMAN FOR IRELAND
bailiffs, and bog bailiffs exhort you to resist "Popery" and withstand the woman who sitteth upon the seven hills. They would fain draw away your eyes in any direction—to Rome, to Jericho, to Timbuctoo, but at all events from your own fields and haggards.
Consider this account which I have given to you of the true nature and meaning of the movement which is called for want of a better name "Repeal," and bethink yourself whether you, the Protestant farmers and labourers of the North, have in this matter any interest distinct from that of the Catholic farmers and labourers of the South, the East, and the West. If you still doubt that a hankering after religious ascendancy is at the bottom of it all, I ask you to consult the Dublin newspapers of July and August, 1846, the period when the old, corrupt, sectarian, money-gathering, and hypocritical association of O'Connell was broken up and abandoned by honest men merely because it was corrupt, money-gathering and hypocritical, but especially because it was sectarian. At the last meeting before this break-up, before leaving that Hall of Humbug for ever, I, who now address you, said (I quote from the Freeman's Journal):
" I am one of the Saxon Irishmen of the North, and you want that race of Irishmen in your ranks more than any other. You cannot well afford to drive even one away from you, however humble and uninfluential. And let me tell you, friends, this is our country as well as yours. You need not expect to free it from the mighty power of England by yourselves—you are not able to do it. Drive
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