ORANGEISM VERSUS PROTESTANTISM.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XI, Issue 46, 14 March 1884, Page 25

ORANGEISM VERSUS PROTESTANTISM.

The Special Correspondent of the Chicago Herald writing from Ireland, says :—: — Nothing could be more erroneous than to confound Orangeism with Irish Protestantism. The latter, as a form of religious belief, is a sturdy, candid, rugged honest faith, whose founders in Ireland were many of them Scotch Purists who resisted religious oppression in Scotland and Ireland during the colonizing periods, when land was being given away in order to destroy the Catholic faith and build up simultaneously an English domination and a Protestant ascendency. These Scotch Protestants remained staunch adherents of modified forms of the reformed doctrines ; but they soon found, to their bitter cost, that English domination in Ireland was to be sustained at any and every cost, and that conscience, whether of the native Roman Catholic or of the colonizing Presbyterian, was not of the smallest value as against the greed and avarice of the English land-absorbing military adventurer whose heirs became the legislators for Ireland. Those Scotch Presbyterians became Irish Nationalists. It was they who first organized a healthful and courageous nationalism in Ireland after the iron code of the penal laws bad extinguished all vitality among the Roman Catholics. It was their patriotism that warmed the almost dead heaitof Ireland into new life and awoke within her stifled soul the breath of liberty. It was their spirit that gradually won into national self-respect many communicants of the Anglican Church, and it was they who were the arch rebels in the dreary days after the popular army bad suffered its last defeat and its leaders were distributed into the welcoming camps of the Continent. It was patriot Irish Protestantism that emancipated the Irish Parliament in 1782 and gave to Ireland a Swift, a Grattan, a Charlemont, a Tone, the Emmets. It was patriot Irish Protestantism that organized the rebellion of '98. It was patriot Irish Protestantism that flamed into f-plendid, if ineffectual, conflagration in '48 and left the names of Mitchel, Martin, Smith O'Brien and their companions in the heavens of Ireland as beacons for the struggle yet to be won. The intellectual Protestantism of Ireland, small in numbers, but manly and uncompromising, is to-day in the front of Irish-National : sm, and it would be an egregious blunder to confound it with Orangeism. Orangeism is a political, no longer a religious, organization in Ireland. God is its second JJeity — its peculiar sort of God ; but its first Deity is the tinsel of the English crown. It is a dull, savage, unreasoning, drinking, rowdyish sort of fanaticism which is as stupid in religion as it is groveling in politics. The man who prefers to be a slave must necessarily combine in his mental and moral being the characteristics of worse than involuntary serfdom in which has J^j^febed many a noble intellect, many a saint's heart. The American JBfno travels quietly through Ireland and sees the habitations of the people ; visits the schools and finds that no history of Ireland is suffered to be taught in them ; scrutinizes the harbors and finds only English shipping there, and little of that ; visits the gaols and sees j men dying of disease who have been held without warrant, bail or

rial, for mere trumpery accusations of a political nature ; examines the goods on the shop counters and finds they are all made abroad &vi imported from a single foreign country ; reads the terms of the Co icion Act by which Ireland, under constitutional English Government, is more despotically crushed than Poland under unconstitutional Eussia. The American who sees these facts for himselE must reach the conclusion that the native of such a country, who prefera that this social and political condition shall be perpetuated, is a being so low in the intellectual and moral scale that in the natural process oE selection and survival he must disappear from sheer incongruity, absurdity and worthlessness. Yet it is this kind of creature who is at present enjoying the congratulations of the leaders of both the great, political parties in England. He boldly declares that the revolver and blood are his methods ; that the arguments of the Nationalists shall not be uttered in his hearing ; that he will answer their logic by blowing out their brains. Upon this kind of campaigning, upon this quality of religion in the London journals, the second officer of the Liberal party in England delivers himself as follows :—": — " But he thought he might safely say this, that so far as he was at present aware, he felt very grateful to Sir Stafford Northcote for the demonstration he had afforded that in one part oE the country, at all events, there still existed a strong feeling of loyalty to the Crown and an ardent attachment to the British connection (cheers)." And' the Marquis of Hartington had no word of rebuke for the cowardly miscreants who had marched with cocked revolvers on peaceable political meetings held by their unarmed neighbors and fellow-countrymen. Immediately following the speech of the Marquis is one by Lord Salisbury. He said:— "l am not speaking of the material aspect of the Irish question, but on the aspect of it as involving the connection of England with a country whose dependence on Kngland is vital to our strategic security, and of our duties toward a large population of men Protestant by religion — (hear, hear) — and of British blood and extraction, to whom our Government in the past has bound us by pledges of honor which, unless we are the meanest of nations, we never can forget (cheer 3). One of the most remarkable events of the present year has been the splendid reception with which my friend, Sir S. Northeote, has met in the various towns of the North of Ireland (cheers). Much, no doubt, of that enthusiasm was due to his personal qualities and to his great services to the Conservative Party (cheers), but much was also an expression on the part of the Irish of the northern province of their unalterable determination that their fate should continue to be linked with that of England." Each man speaks for his party. Neither had a word of condemnation for the brutal and savage means by which the " English connection "isto be preserved — if it is to be. The Protestants of Ireland are in no danger at the hands of their Catholic countrymen, upon whom all the complications, the penalties, and the pains were inflicted ; but in this flimsy pretext Ireland is to be left without constitutional government. That the English administration in Ireland is responsible, therefore, for the sanguinary disgrace of a portion of the country, and especially for disgracing Ulster Protestantism, whose curner-stone is liberty of private judgement, in politics a«j in the interpretation of the Scriptures, is beyond question. Sir Stafford Northcote, Lord Salisbury, and the Marquis of Hartington are fine exemplars for Irish Orangemen.