dent generous Protestants in three provinces might be won, but not in Ulster in this generation. The men associated with Tone and Russell had no successors. The young men of the Church of England were mostly Orangemen systematically trained in the belief that their Church, and perhaps their personal property, would be plundered by the Catholics if they obtained power. The Presbyterians were not in general Orangemen, but there were settlements of Cameronians and Covenanters among them who kept alive a fierce enmity and contempt of "the Romanists," and knew no more of Tone and Russell than of the Gracchi.[1] I had lived all my life in the province, and I never met a Protestant Nationalist of my own generation (although there were doubtless a few survivors of '98) except three one of my schoolfellows, another who was a man of letters in London, and the third who was a young attorney residing at Bannbridge, who came to see me at the time of the O'Connell dinner, and expressed warm sympathy with the Nationalist minority.[2]
Of our promised colleagues in the journal Davis relied chiefly upon Dillon. Dillon, he said, was horrified at the condition of the peasantry in Connaught, and was impatient to take up the land question, which was doubtless of less interest in the North, where the farmers had security of tenure, and were tolerably content with their landlords. I assured him the tenants were not at all content, that the landlords violated the Ulster tenant-right as far and as often as they dared, and, like the Marquis of Londonderry, interfered in the management of farms with insolence which was wanton. In one memorable case the Marquis threatened immediate eviction to a tenant not in arrears of rent because he cultivated a whin hedge which offended the landlord's taste as a scientific agriculturist. I had brought some cases of this sort to light, and I was persuaded that there was a deep and widespread discontent among the Presbyterian
- ↑ Wolfe Tone, half a century earlier, had for the first time formulated the principle upon which alone Ireland could be saved. "To unite the whole people of Ireland, to abolish the memory of all past dissensions, and to substitute the common name of Irishmen in place of the denominations of Protestant, Catholic, or Dissenter these," he said, "were my means" (to win the independence of the country).
- ↑ Matt Trumble, John Fisher Murray, and John Mitchel.
