Episcopal bench and to other places of preferment, saved the Church of
England from being identified _in toto_ with either party in the State.

In Ireland, unfortunately, the case was far different, for there
property and the Established Church found themselves ranged side by side
in the maintenance of their respective privileges against the democracy,
which, as it happened, was Catholic, and which for many years after the
Union did not recover from the long and demoralising persecution of the
Penal Laws.

The aristocracy resisted emancipation, in spite of the fact that it was
advocated by all the greatest statesmen and orators of two generations,
and it did so quite as much because it was emancipation of the masses as
because it was emancipation of the Catholics. The Church of Ireland at
the same time dreaded the reform since it had the foresight to perceive
that the outcome would be an attack upon her prerogatives and an assault
upon her position. The anticipations of both were well founded. Nine
years after the Emancipation Act, tithe, which an English Prime Minister
had declared was as sacred as rent, was by Act of Parliament commuted
into a rent-charge no longer collected directly from the tenant, but
paid by the landlord, who, however, compensated himself for its
incidence on his shoulders by raising rents. Forty years later the
Church Act was passed, and almost simultaneously was begun the assault
on the land system which had given support to, and received it from, the
Church Establishment.

I have heard it said by Englishmen who have watched the course of
politics for some years that the jingling watchword which Lord Randolph
Churchill coined for the Unionists twenty years ago, that Home Rule
would spell Rome Rule, if used again to-day would to a very great extent