Parliament, is a calumny so grotesque and so transparent that it could only have been resorted to by those advocates of persecution who would stoop to any quibble in their cause. And, at all events, after the Treaty of Limerick had been signed, during the long agony of the penal laws no rebellion took place. About 14,000 Irish soldiers had at once passed into the French service, and a steady stream of emigration soon carried off all the Catholic energy from the country. Deprived of their natural leaders, sunk for the most part in the most brutal ignorance and in the most abject poverty, the Irish Catholics at home remained perfectly passive, while both England and Scotland were convulsed by Jacobitism. It is a memorable fact that the ferocious law of 1703, which first reduced the Irish Catholics to a condition of hopeless servitude, does not allege as the reason for its provisions any political crime. It was called 'An Act to prevent the further growth of Popery.' It was justified in its preamble on the ground that the Papists still continued in their gross and dangerous errors, that some Protestants had been perverted to Popery, and that some Papists had refused to make provision for their Protestant children. A considerable military force was, indeed, kept in Ireland, but this was chiefly because the ministers desired to keep under arms a more numerous standing army than Parliament would tolerate in England, and also to throw upon the Irish revenue a great part of the burden; and whenever serious danger arose, a large proportion was at once withdrawn. The evidence we possess on this subject is curiously complete. In the great rebellion of 1715 not a single overt act of treason was proved against the Catholics in Ireland, and at a time when civil war was raging both in England and Scotland the country remained so profoundly tranquil that the The peculiar situation of that country' [Ireland], says Macpherson, seems to have been overlooked in the contest. The desertion upon which the deprivation of James had been founded in England had not existed in Ireland. The Lord-Lieutenancy had retained its allegiance. The Govern ment was uniformly continued under the name of the Prince from whom the servants of the Crown had derived their commissions. James himself had for more than seventeen months exercised the royal function in Ireland. He was certainly de facto, if not de jure, king.'-Hist. of Great Britain. Government sent over several regiments to Scotland to subdue the Jacobites.1 In 1719, when the alarm of an invasion of England was very great, the Duke of Bolton, who was then Lord Lieutenant, wrote to the Government that if they did not fear a foreign invasion of Ireland they might safely withdraw the greater part of the army for other services; and he only urged that the nation, on account of its extreme poverty, might be relieved from the necessity of paying the troops during their absence. A few weeks later a leading official, writing from Dublin Castle, states that seven Irish regiments were at this time out of the kingdom, that they were still paid from the Irish revenue, and that four more were about to embark.2 The next great Jacobite alarm was in 1722, and in the very beginning of the danger six regiments were sent from Ireland to England.3 The Lord Lieutenant vainly asked that they might be paid, while in England, from the English revenue, and his request being refused he begged that they might return as soon as possible, not on account of any danger in Ireland, but because it was reasonable that the advantages of entertaining those regiments should accrue to that kingdom from which they received their pay.' In 1725, Swift, who had no sympathy with the Catholics, declared that in Ireland the Pretender's party was at an end, and that the Papists in general, of any substance or estates, and their priests almost universally, are what we call Whigs in the sense which by that word is generally understood.' 5 In the great rebellion of 1745, when Scotland was 1 Mémoires de Berwick, ii. 159. 2 See the letters of the Duke of Bolton of July and July 25, and that of Mr. Webster, of August 6, 1719, MSS. English Record-office. We are sending off six regiments to assist you. One would think, considering the number of Papists we have here, that our gentry are for the most part in England, and all our money goes there, that we should rather expect help from you in any distress, than send you forces to protect you. Yet this is the third time we have done so since his Majesty's accession to the throne, and withal preserved the kingdom from any insurrection or rebellion, which is more than can be said for England or Scotland.' Archbishop King to the Archbishop of Canterbury (May, 1722), British Museum MSS. add. 6117. The Duke of Grafton to the Lords Justices, November 24, 1722. MS. Irish State Paper Office. • Seventh Drapier's Letter for a time chiefly in the hands of the Pretender, when the Highland army had marched into the heart of England, and when the Protestant succession was very seriously endangered, there was not a ripple of agitation in Ireland; and soon after the struggle was over, Archbishop Stone, the Protestant Primate, delivered in the House of Lords the most emphatic testimony to the loyalty of the Catholics. He declared that in the year 1747, after that rebellion was entirely suppressed, happening to be in England, he had an opportunity of perusing all the papers of the rebels and their correspondents, which were seized in the custody of Murray, the Pretender's secretary, and that after having spent much time and taken great pains in examining them (not without some share of the then common suspicion that there might be some private understanding and intercourse between them and the Irish Catholics), he could not discover the least trace, hint, or intimation of such intercourse or correspondence in them, or of any of the latter's favouring or abetting, or having been so much as made acquainted with, the designs or proceedings of these rebels." Everything, indeed, connected with this history corroborates the assertion of Burke, that 'all the penal laws of that unparalleled code of oppression were manifestly the effects of national hatred and scorn towards a conquered people whom the victors delighted to trample upon and were not at all afraid to provoke. They were not the effect of their fears, but of their security. Whilst that temper prevailed, and it prevailed in all its force to a time within our memory, every measure was pleasing and popular just in proportion as it tended to harass and ruin a set of people who were looked upon as enemies to God and man, and, indeed, as a race of savages who were a disgrace to human nature itself." 2 Almost all the great persecutions of history, those of the early Christians, of Catholics and Protestants on the Continent, and, after the Revolution, of Catholics in England, were directed 'Curry's State of the Irish Catholics, ii. p. 261. See also, on the profound tranquillity of Ireland, Horace Wal pole, Memoirs of George III. p. 278. 2 Burke's Letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe. against small minorities. It was the distinguishing characteristic of the Irish penal code that its victims constituted at least three-fourths of the nation, and that it was deliberately intended to demoralise as well as degrade. Its enactments may be divided into different groups. One group was intended to deprive the Catholics of all civil life. By an Act of the English Parliament they were forbidden to sit in that of Ireland.' They were afterwards deprived of the elective suffrage, excluded from the corporations, from the magistracy, from the bar, from the bench, from the grand juries, and from the vestries. They could not be sheriffs or solicitors, or even gamekeepers or constables. They were forbidden to possess any arms; and any two justices, or mayor, or sheriff, might at any time Issue a search warrant to break into their houses and ransack them for arms, and if a fowling-piece or a flask of powder was discovered they were liable either to fine or imprisonment or to whipping and the pillory. They were, of course, excluded on the same grounds from the army and navy. They could not even possess a horse of the value of more than 5l., and any Protestant on tendering that sum could appropriate the hunter or the carriage horse of his Catholic neighbour.2 In his own country the Catholic was only recognised by the law, 'for repression and punishment.' The Lord Chancellor Bowes and the Chief Justice Robinson both distinctly laid down from the bench 'that the law does not suppose any such person to exist as an Irish Roman Catholic.' 3 The effect of these measures was to offer the strongest inducements to all men of ability and enterprise to conform outwardly to the dominant creed. If they did not, every path of ambition and almost all means of livelihood were closed to them, and they were at the same time exposed to the most constant, 13 William and Mary, ch. 2. English. The other measures of the code were enacted by the Irish parliament and will be found in the Irish Statutes. 27 William III. c. 5; 10 William III. c. 8 and 13; 2 Anne, c. 6; 6 Anne, c. 6; 8 Anne, c. 3; 2 George 344. Scully On the Penal Laws, p galling, and humiliating tyranny. The events of the Revolution had divided the people into opposing sections bitterly hostile to each other. The most numerous section had no rights, while the whole tendency of the law was to produce in the dominant minority, already flushed with the pride of conquest and with recent confiscations, all the vices of the most insolent aristocracy. Religious animosity, private quarrels, simple rapacity, or that mere love of the tyrannical exercise of despotic power which is so active a principle in human affairs, continually led to acts of the most odious oppression which it was dangerous to resent and impossible to resist. The law gave the Protestant the power of inflicting on the Catholic intolerable annoyance. To avoid it, he readily submitted to illegal tyranny, and even under the most extreme wrong it was hopeless for him to look for legal redress. All the influence of property and office was against him, and every tribunal to which he could appeal was occupied by his enemies. The Parliament and the Government, the corporation which disposed of his city property, the vestry which taxed him, the magistrate before whom he carried his complaint, the solicitor who drew up his case, the barrister who pleaded it, the judge who tried it, the jury who decided it, were all Protestants. Of all tyrannies, a class tyranny has been justly described as the most intolerable, for it is ubiquitous in its operation, and weighs, perhaps, most heavily on those whose obscurity or distance would withdraw them from the notice of a single despot; and of all class tyrannies, perhaps the most odious is that which rests upon religious distinctions and is envenomed by religious animosities. To create such a tyranny in Ireland was the first We have a curious illustration of the operation of the religious distinctions in the humblest spheres, in the following notice in the Commons Journals. A petition of one Edward Spragg and others in behalf of themselves and other Protestant porters in and about the city of Dublin, complaining that one Darby Ryan, a captain under the late King James, and a Papist, buys up whole cargoes of coals and employs porters of his own persuasion to carry the same to customers, by which the petitioners are hindered from their small trade and gains.' The petition was referred to the Committee of Grievances to report upon it to the House.-Commons Journals, v. 2, p. 699. Of the effect of the laws on the higher classes we may judge from the testimony of Burke. Sure I am that |