of the enfranchised majority might be used against them.

That this is a groundless fear is shown from the fact that no men have
been more honoured in Ireland than such Protestant leaders as William
Smith O'Brien, Thomas Davis, John Mitchel, John Martin, Isaac Butt, and
Charles Stewart Parnell. The same feeling is constantly shown at this
moment towards distinguished Protestants among the present Irish
Parliamentary Party.

What has fostered the Anti-Irish feeling among Irish Protestants for the
last hundred years has undoubtedly been the fell system of Orangeism,
which has caused so much hatred and bloodshed among men who, whatever
their race or creed, are now children of the one common soil. The
Orangeman looked upon himself as part of a foreign garrison, holding the
"Papishes" in subjection. He was armed with deadly weapons;
consequently, the defenceless Catholic was almost entirely at his mercy,
and the Orangeman was but too often backed up in his lawlessness by the
law and its administrators.

This almost necessitated the existence, as a kind of defence against
Orangeism, of a body I used to hear them speaking of when I was a boy in
Ballymagenaghy, called the "Thrashers," which, I imagine, must have been
some kind of a secret society.

It must have been a sort of survival of these "Thrashers" that my
friend, Michael Davitt, many years afterwards, came across somewhere in
the North of England. The incident, as described by him, was both
amusing and saddening. He addressed them in his capacity as a Fenian
Organiser. After they had heard him patiently, an old man, the
spokesman, said: