object of the penal laws, and the effect upon the Catholics was what might have been expected. Great numbers, by dishonest and hypocritical compliances, endeavoured to free themselves from a position that was intolerable. The mass of the people gradually acquired the vices of slaves. They were educated through long generations of oppression into an inveterate hostility to the law, and were taught to look for redress in illegal violence or secret combinations. A second object of the penal laws was to reduce the Catholics to a condition of the most extreme and brutal ignorance. As Burke has justly said: To render men patient under such a deprivation of all the rights of human nature, everything which would give them a knowledge or feeling of those rights was rationally forbidden.' The legislation on the subject of Catholic education may be briefly described, for it amounted simply to universal, unqualified, and unlimited proscription. The Catholic was excluded from the University. He was not permitted to be the guardian of a child. It was made penal for him to keep a school, to act as usher or private tutor, or to send his children to be educated abroad; and a reward of 10l. was offered for the discovery of a Popish schoolmaster. In 1733, it is true, charter schools were established by Primate. Boulter, for the benefit of the Catholics; but these schoolswhich were supported by public funds-were avowedly intended, by bringing up the young as Protestants, to extirpate the religion of their parents. The alternative offered by law to the Catholics was that of absolute and compulsory ignorance or of an education directly subversive of their faith. there have been thousands in Ireland who have never conversed with a Roman Catholic in their whole lives, unless they happened to talk to their gardeners' workmen, or to ask their way when they had lost it in their sports; or, at best, who had known them only as footmen or other domestics of the second and third order; and so averse were they some time ago to have them near their persons, that they would not employ even those who could never find their way beyond the stable. I well remember a great, and in many respects a good man, who advertised for a blacksmith, but at the same time added, "he must be a Protestant."-Letter to Sir H. Langrishe. Letter to a Peer of Ireland on the Penal Laws. 27 William III. c. 4; 2 Anne, c. 6 8 Anne, c. 3. The operation of these laws alone might have been safely trusted to reduce the Catholic population to complete degradation; but there were many other provisions, intended to check any rising spirit of enterprise that might appear among them, and to prevent any ray of hope from animating their lot. In the acquisition of personal property, it is true, there is but little in the way of restriction to be added. By the laws I have described, the immense majority of the Irish people were excluded, in their own country, from almost every profession, and from every Government office, from the highest to the lowest, and they were placed under conditions that made the growth of industrial virtues and the formation of an enterprising and aspiring character wholly impossible. They were excluded from a great part of the benefit of the taxes they paid. They were at the same time compelled to pay double to the militia, and in case of war with a Catholic power, to reimburse the damage done by the enemies' privateers. They could not obtain the freedom of any town corporate, and were only suffered to carry on their trades in their native cities, on condition of paying special and vexatious impositions known by the name of quarterage. They were forbidden, after a certain date, to take up their abodes in the important cities of Limerick and Galway, or to purchase property within their walls; and their progress in many industrial careers was effectually trammelled by the law already referred to, preventing them from possessing any horse of the value of more than 5l.' The chief branches of Irish commerce and industry had, as we shall see, been deliberately crushed by law in the interests of English manufacturers; but the Catholics were not specially disabled from participating in them, and the legislator con 6. 17 William III. c. 5; 2 Anne, c. 6; 2 George I. c. 9; 9 George II. c. See too Burke's Tracts on the Popery Laws. The law about horses was found so detrimental to the breed that it was afterwards enacted in Ireland, (8 Anne, c. 3) that Papists might possess 'stud mares and stallions, and the breed or produce thereof under the age of five years' of a greater value than 57. A law similar to the Irish Horses by Papists are not to be ridden, tented himself with assigning strict limits to their success by providing that, except in the linen trade, no Catholic could have more than two apprentices.1 In the case of landed property, however, the laws were more severe, for it was the third great object of the penal code to dissociate the Catholics as much as possible from the soil. Of this policy it may be truly said, that unless it was inspired by unmixed malevolence, and intended to make the nation permanently incapable of self-government, it was one of the most infatuated that could be conceived. Land being an irremovable property, subject to Government control, has always proved the best pledge of the loyalty of its possessor, and its acquisition never fails to diffuse through a disaffected class conservative and orderly habits. One of the first objects of every wise legislator, and, indeed, of every good man, should be to soften the division of classes; and no social condition can be more clearly dangerous or diseased than that in which these divisions coincide with, and are intensified by differences of creed. To make the landlord class almost exclusively Protestant, while the tenant class were almost exclusively Catholic, was to plant in Ireland the seeds of the most permanent and menacing divisions. On the other hand, a class of Catholic landlords connected with one portion of the people by property and with another portion by religion could not fail to soften at once the animosities of class and of creed. They would have become the natural political leaders of their co-religionists, and it is to the absence of such a class that both the revolutionary and sacerdotal extravagances of Irish Catholic politics are mainly to be attributed. The great confiscations under James I., Cromwell, and William had done much to make the proprietary of Ireland exclusively Protestants. The penal laws continued the work. No Catholic was suffered to buy land, or inherit or receive it as a gift from Protestants, or to hold life annuities, or leases for more than thirty-one years, or any lease on such terms that the 1 8 Anne, c. 3. profits of the lands exceeded one-third of the rent. If a Catholic leaseholder, by his skill or industry, so increased his profits that they exceeded this proportion, and did not immediately make a corresponding increase in his rent, his farm passed to the first Protestant who made the discovery. If a Catholic secretly purchased either his own forfeited estate, or any other land in the possession of a Protestant, the first Protestant who informed against him became the proprietor. The whole country was soon filled with spies, endeavouring to appropriate the property of Catholics; and Popish discoveries became a main business of the law courts. The few Catholic landlords who remained after the confiscations, were deprived of the liberty of testament, which was possessed by all other subjects of the Crown. Their estates, upon their death, were divided equally among their sons, unless the eldest became a Protestant; in which case the whole was settled upon him.' In this manner Catholic landlords were gradually but surely impoverished. Their land passed almost universally into the hands of Protestants, and the few who succeeded in retaining large estates did so only by compliances which destroyed the wholesome moral influence that would naturally have attached to their position. The penal code, as it was actually carried out, was inspired much less by fanaticism than by rapacity, and was directed less against the Catholic religion than against the property and industry of its professors. It was intended to make them poor and to keep them poor, to crush in them every germ of enterprise, to degrade them into a servile caste who could never hope to rise to the level of their oppressors. The division of classes was made as deep as possible, and every precaution was taken to perpetuate and to embitter it. Any Protestant who married a Catholic, or who suffered his children to be educated as Catholics, was exposed to all the disabilities of the code. Any Protestant woman who was a landowner, if she married a Catholic, was at once deprived of her inheritance, which passed to the nearest Protestant heir. A later law provided that · 2 Anno, c. 6; 8 Anne, c. 3. every marriage celebrated by a Catholic priest between a Catholic and a Protestant should be null, and that the priest who officiated should be hung.1 The creation by law of a gigantic system of bribery intended to induce the Catholics to abandon or disguise their creed, and of an army of spies and informers intended to prey upon their property, had naturally a profoundly demoralising influence, but hardly so much so as the enactments which were designed to sow discord and insubordination in their homes. These measures, which may be looked upon as the fourth branch of the penal code, appear to have rankled more than any others in the minds of the Catholics, and they produced the bitterest and most pathetic complaints. The law I have cited, by which the eldest son of a Catholic, upon apostatising, became the heirat-law to the whole estate of his father, reduced his father to the position of a mere life tenant, and prevented him from selling, mortgaging, or otherwise disposing of it, is a typical measure of this class. In like manner a wife who apostatised was immediately freed from her husband's control, and the Chancellor was empowered to assign to her a certain proportion of her husband's property. If any child, however young, professed to be a Protestant, it was at once taken from its father's care. The Chancellor, or the child itself, if an adult, might compel the father to produce the title-deeds of his estate, and declare on oath the value of his property; and such a proportion as the Chancellor determined was given to the child.2 Children were thus set against their parents, and wives against their husbands, and jealousies, suspicions, and heart-burnings. were introduced into the Catholic home. The undutiful wife, the rebellious and unnatural son, had only to add to their other crimes the guilt of a feigned conversion, in order to secure both impunity and reward, and to deprive those whom they had injured of the management and disposal of their property. The influence of the code appeared, indeed, omnipresent. It 19 William III. c. 3; 7 George II. c. 5 and 6; 13 George II. c. 6. 19 George II. c. 13; 23 George II. c. 10. 2 2 Anne, c. 6; 8 Anne, c. 3. |