shows what it does mean. 'New ascendancy is old mastership. It is
neither more nor less than the resolution of one sect of people in
Ireland to consider themselves the sole citizens in the commonwealth,
and to keep a dominion over the rest, by reducing them to absolute
slavery under a military power; and thus fortified in their power, to
divide the public estate, which is the result of general contribution,
as a military booty, solely among themselves. This ascendancy,
by being a _Protestant_ ascendancy, does not better it, from a
combination of a note or two more in this anti-harmonic scale. By
the use that is frequently made of the term, and the policy that is
grafted on it, the name Protestant becomes nothing more or better than
the name of a persecuting faction, with a relation of some sort of
theological hostility to others, but without any sort of ascertained
tenets of its own, upon the ground of which it persecutes other men;
for the patrons of this Protestant ascendancy neither do nor can,
by anything positive, define or describe what they mean by the word
Protestant.... The whole is nothing but pure and perfect malice. It
is indeed a perfection in that kind, belonging to beings of a higher
order than man, and to them we ought to leave it.... Let three
millions of people but abandon all that they and their ancestors have
been taught to believe sacred, and to forswear it publicly in terms
the most degrading, and nothing more is required of them.... The word
_Protestant_ is the charm that locks up in a dungeon of servitude
three millions of people.

Every thoughtful reader of the debates in parliament on the state of
Ireland, must have been struck with the difference of opinion between
the Liberals and the Conservatives, as to the facts of the case. A
still more violent difference was presented in the British parliament,
in the year 1797, when there were great debates in both houses on the