population to come over to his Church. The Catholic clergyman
belongs to a religion that has always been more desirous of gaining
proselytes than the Protestant Church; and he is animated by a sense
of injury and a desire of revenge. Another reason for the
disproportionate increase of Catholics is that the Catholics will
marry upon means which the Protestant considers as insufficient for
marriage. A few potatoes and a shed of turf are all that Luther has
left for the Romanist; and, when the latter gets these, he instantly
begins upon the great Irish manufacture of children. But a
Protestant belongs to the sect that eats the fine flour and heaves
the bran to others; he must have comforts, and he does not marry
till he gets them. He would be ashamed if he were seen living as a
Catholic lives. This is the principal reason why the Protestants
who remain attached to their Church do not increase so fast as the
Catholics. But in common minds, daily scenes, the example of the
majority, the power of imitation, decide their habits, religious as
well as civil. A Protestant labourer who works among Catholics soon
learns to think and act and talk as they do; he is not proof against
the eternal panegyric which he hears of Father O'Leary. His
Protestantism is rubbed away, and he goes at last, after some little
resistance, to the chapel where he sees everybody else going.

These eight Catholics not only hate the ninth man, the Protestant of
the Establishment, for the unjust privileges he enjoys--not only
remember that the lands of their father were given to his father--
but they find themselves forced to pay for the support of his
religion. In the wretched state of poverty in which the lower
orders of Irish are plunged, it is not without considerable effort
that they can pay the few shillings necessary for the support of
their Catholic priest; and when this is effected, a tenth of the