The attitude, however, of Catholic Ireland, and the sentiments of the immense majority of the Irish Catholics, must cause painful misgivings in reflecting minds. Their aristocracy, indeed, and their landed gentry have always been loyal and true subjects; they can scarcely be distinguished from their Protestant fellows. The Irish Catholics, too, of the upper middle classes are generally attached to the institutions under which they live; and Catholic Ireland has produced many eminent public servants, and has given splendid ornaments to the Bench and the Bar. But the spirit that prevails among the Irish Catholic lower middle classes, and notably among the masses of the peasantry, and the opinions and feelings they ostentatiously avow, are deeply to be regretted in many respects. Notwithstanding all that has been done for it, and the immense reforms made in its interest, this part of Catholic Ireland is, beyond question, more disaffected and disloyal to the State than it was when O'Connell was its master spirit; it is more hostile to government, law, and the existing order of things. The teaching of the Land and the National Leagues, and of the successor which has taken their place, has penetrated into the Corporations and Local Boards, in which the Catholic Irish are supreme; these assemblies echo with revolutionary and socialistic cries, and denounce the whole system of British rule in Ireland, aiming especially at the Sovereign and those in the highest places. The Irish Catholics, too, in the three provinces of the south, have gained a complete ascendency in county and municipal affairs; their first object has been to exclude the landed gentry from them, and to destroy the influence which belongs to property; and they have exhibited tendencies absolutely opposed to the Constitution to which they owe their authority. The worst symptoms, however, appear in the state of the peasantry; they have obtained advantages of which their fathers never even dreamed; the land system has been turned upside down for their behoof; they have no grievance in landed relations; and yet they remain unfriendly to the State, and show no sign of gratitude. This class contains the multitudes, who for more than twenty years, have allied themselves with a conspiracy against our power in Ireland, and who, at the bidding of designing men, shout treasonable utterances at mob gatherings, and denounce the 'Saxon' and 'landlordism' with one voice; and though they are a timid and somewhat inert mass, and they would not rise like their fathers in 1798, they would not lift a hand to support our rule were foreign invaders to descend on our shores. This state of opinion, no doubt, is intelligible to the real student of Irish history; the Irish Catholics are a people who have been cruelly wronged; they have only slowly risen out of serf-like thraldom; above all, they have only attained the position they hold in the State after long years of trials, and by giving trouble; they treasure the Celtic traditions of the past; we may regret that they are what they are, but can hardly feel surprise. In other respects, the Irish Catholic masses, especially in a democratic age, must arouse the solicitude of thinkers worthy of the name. Many thousands of them are still illiterate; they are too generally the mere followers of priests and demagogues, tossed hither and thither as their masters direct; they are animated by crude and wild ideas, like the peasantry of France before the Revolution; they have scarcely anything in common with the corresponding class in England, trained for centuries in habits of well-ordered liberty. They form, in a word, a dangerous and easily led democracy; and yet, owing to recent legislation, ever to be deplored, they possess almost a monopoly of political power in Ireland, and have sent representatives to Parliament whose acts are a byword.