Home Rule | Page 5

a simple imperative, mercilessly applied without regard to national conditions. It came under Cromwell as a scorching, devastating flame. It remained under William and the Georges as a slow, cruel torture applied through all the avenues of the law. The end of all that effort was, not to convert or destroy, but to weld the national and religious spirits into one common force, acting together throughout the nineteenth century as if identical.
Purified by persecution, Catholicism in Ireland, almost alone among the religions of Western Europe, stands out still to-day as a great national and democratic force.
But though the persecution failed, it built up, by a double process of immigration and monopoly, a very powerful Protestant population with all the stiff pride of ascendancy. For generations the Protestants of Ireland enjoyed all the offices of government, and had the sole right of inheritance. Thus both the land and the government slipped into their hands. Since no Catholic could inherit land under the penal laws, and since the penal laws lasted for nearly a century, it followed inevitably that the whole land of Ireland fell into the hands of the Protestants. That is why even at the present day the vast majority of the Irish landed and leisured classes are Protestants. The Catholics, during that dark period, became hewers of wood and drawers of water. Thus property in Ireland came to mean, not merely a division of classes, but also a division of creeds. In spite of all the great reforms, the descendants of these Protestants still retain most of the wealth and most of the Government offices in Ireland.[8] Their resistance to any change is not, therefore, altogether surprising; and we must remember amid all the various war-cries of the present agitation that these gentlemen are fighting, not merely for the integrity of the Empire, but also for position, income and power.
This state of affairs has varied very little for the last half-century.
The Census of 1911 contains, like most previous Irish Census returns, a schedule asking for a statement of religious faith. That enables us to tell with comparative accuracy the proportions between the Catholics and Protestants in Ireland since 1861, when the schedule was first introduced, right up to the present day.
The Preliminary Report shows that the variation has been very slight. The round figures for 1911 are:--
Roman Catholics 3,238,000 Protestant Episcopalians 575,000 Presbyterians 439,000 Methodists 61,000
The figures for 1861 were:--
Roman Catholics 4,500,000 Protestant Episcopalians 693,000 Presbyterians 523,000 Methodists 45,000[9]
There has been an all-round decrease, corresponding to the decrease of the population. That decrease has been brought about by emigration, and that emigration has taken place mainly from the Catholic provinces of Munster and Connaught. It is inevitable, therefore, that the Catholics should have diminished more than the Protestants. The result of forty years' wastage of the Irish Catholic peasantry is that the proportions of Catholics to Protestants are now three to one, as against four to one in 1861. Allowing for the great fact of westward emigration, this means that the relations between these two forms of Christianity in Ireland are practically stationary.
The Protestants, too, we must not forget, are divided into two sects--Episcopalian and Presbyterian--which in their history have been almost divided from one another as Catholicism and Protestantism, so much so that several times in Irish history--as, for instance, in 1798--the Catholic and Presbyterian have been brought together by a common persecution at the hands of the Episcopalian.
We must also bear in mind that the Protestants are mainly concentrated in the two provinces of Ulster and Leinster. Ulster contains nearly all the Irish Presbyterians--421,000 out of 439,000--men who are rather Scotch by descent than actually native Irish. Ulster also contains 366,000 Episcopalians, making, with 48,000 Methodists, 835,000 Protestants in Ulster, out of 1,075,000 in the whole of Ireland. The rest of the Episcopalians are in Leinster--round Dublin--where 140,000 are domiciled. Munster contains less than 60,000 Protestants in all, and Connaught contains little over 20,000.[10] It is practically a Catholic province.
The great fact about this religious situation in Ireland, therefore, is that you have a Catholic country with a strong Protestant minority.
We are asked to believe that this presents an insuperable obstacle to the gift of self-government. But Ireland does not stand alone in this respect. There are many other countries in the world where the same difficulty has been faced and overcome. Take the German Empire. It has included since 1870 the great state of Bavaria, where the great struggle of the Reformation ended with honours divided. Modern Bavaria contains a population which, according to the Religious Census of December 1st, 1905, is thus divided:--
Roman Catholics 4,600,000 Protestants 1,844,000 Jews 55,000
Strangely enough, the proportions are almost precisely the same as in Ireland. But this state of affairs has not prevented the German Empire from leaving to Bavaria,