The first is the religious difference, Usually this is regarded as the most critical of all differences, It is certainly the most conspicuous. But it does not (in spite of all that has been said) intimately affect the ives of neighbours, short time ago, bitter agitation in Belfast against Protestant employers of Catholic workmen, heating one of the company (we were all Protestants in the company) de-telaring that it was monstrous that Catholics should be employed by good Protestants. A friend of his once asked him why it was that in his own factory Catholics formed wine-tenths of the whole. I shall not easily forget the astonished silence of that man, He had never considered the question in regard to himself. His own relations with his Catholic employees were of the happiest and friendliest, The instance is typical. Religion in the six counties is, on set occa sions only, a formal badge of war, Jand only in rare cases does it sever human relationships. It is the Church of Rome, as an institution, ito which the Northern Irish Protestant objects; and he never associates his Catholic neighbours, with whom hho lives and does business, with that antipathy. But for the Catholic Church as an institution, and more particularly as an organization, he has something like a horror of the blood; and, as the rest of Ireland is Catholic, he recoils from association
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.