The Celt again looked impatiently for the sails which were to bring succour from Brest; and the Saxon was again backed by the whole power of England.
Again the victory remained with the well educated and well organized minority.

But, happily, the vanquished people found protection in a quarter from which they would once have had to expect nothing but implacable severity.

By this time the philosophy of the eighteenth century had purifed English Whiggism from that deep taint of intolerance which had been contracted during a long and close alliance with the Puritanism of the seventeenth century.

Enlightened men had begun to feel that the arguments by which Milton and Locke, Tillotson and Burnet, had vindicated the rights of conscience might be urged with not less force in favour of the Roman Catholic than in favour of the Independent or the Baptist.

The great party which traces its descent through the Exclusionists up to the Roundheads continued during thirty years, in spite of royal frowns and popular clamours, to demand a share in all the benefits of our free constitution for those Irish Papists whom the Roundheads and the Exclusionists had considered merely as beasts of chase or as beasts of burden.