Under Grattan's Parliament Trinity College, Dublin, opened its doors,
though not its endowments, to Catholics. In 1795 a petition from
Maynooth, the lay college in which was not till twenty years later
suppressed by Government for political reasons, was presented to the
Irish House of Commons by Henry Grattan, protesting against the
exclusion of Protestants from its halls. In the ranks of the Volunteers,
who secured free trade in 1779 and Parliamentary Independence in 1782,
Catholics and Protestants stood shoulder to shoulder, and the
independent legislature, which was the outcome of their efforts, granted
the franchise to the Catholics.

It was of course natural, when Catholics were excluded from Parliament,
that the leaders of the people should have been members of the
Protestant Church, but in view of the alleged bigotry at the present day
of the mass of the Irish people it is surely significant that Isaac Butt
and Parnell were both members of the Church of minority, that to take
three of the fiercest opponents of the maintenance of the Union John
Mitchell was a Unitarian, Thomas Davis an Episcopalian Protestant, and
Joseph Biggar a Presbyterian. At this moment of the Nationalist Members
of Parliament nine, or more than ten per cent., are Protestants, and one
may well ask if the Orangemen have ever had a like proportion of
Catholic members of their party, and _à fortiori_ what would be thought
of the suggestion that a member of that religion should lead them in
the House of Commons. The difficulty experienced in Great Britain by
would-be candidates of either party in securing their adoption by local
associations if they are Catholics is so common as to make the excessive
bigotry alleged against the Irish Catholics, one-tenth of whose
representatives are Protestants, appear very much exaggerated.

That bigotry exists among Catholics to some extent I should be the last,