most eminent men of his generation, that the difference between the two religions was much exaggerated; that it was continually lessening, and that the process of assimilation would be greatly accelerated by the removal of the religious disabilities. His speeches are full of intimations of this opinion. Bigotry may survive persecution, but it can never survive toleration.' 'What Luther did for us, philosophy has done in some degree for the Roman Catholics, and their religion has undergone a silent reformation; and both divisions of Christianity, unless they have lost their understanding, must have lost their animosity, though they have retained their distinctions.' 'It is the error of sects to value themselves more upon their differences than upon their religion.'

Among the Roman Catholics themselves, for a considerable time, scarcely any political life had existed. About the middle of the century, it is true, three Catholic writers, named O'Connor, Wyse and Curry, made laudable efforts to arouse them; and a Catholic Association was founded in 1759, but their spirits were completely cowed by long oppression, and the restrictions on education had prevented the development of their intellect. At last, however, Father O'Leary, a really remarkable writer, rose among them. His principal works are a series of masterly letters to Wesley, who had written against the removal of the penal laws; an address to the Roman Catholics, inculcating loyalty during the Rebellion of 1745; and a short treatise on the Socinian controversy. In England he is chiefly remembered by his happy retort to a Protestant bishop, to whose picture of the horrors of purgatory he replied, 'Your lordship might go farther and fare worse;' but his name is still popular in Ireland, and his writings are well worthy of perusal, if it were only for the great beauty of their style. He was a man of much wit and

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social charm, and became a member of a convivial society called the Monks of the Screw,' which was presided over by Curran and which included most of the first men in the country. It is a slight but a significant fact, that when on one occasion he went to the Volunteer Convention, the volunteer guard turned out and presented arms to this Catholic priest. He attained a position in Ireland which no member of his order had held for more than a century; his writings were widely read, and Grattan panegyrised him in Parliament. The concluding sentence of that panegyric is curiously characteristic of the speaker, of his subject, and of the theological temperature of their time. 'If I did not know him,' he said, 'to be a Christian clergyman, I should suppose him by his writings to be a philosopher of the Augustan age.' O'Leary appears to have been a thoroughly loyal man and to have rendered some considerable services to the Government, and he received from it a small secret pension.

With this exception, the Catholics seem for many years to have made scarcely any decided effort to improve their condition, though a Catholic Committee existed for the purpose of watching over their interests. It was chiefly under the direction of Lord Kenmare and a few other leading Catholic country gentry.

Grattan conducted their cause with great tact. He refused to make it a party question, and by this,(refusal obtained the assistance of Sir Hercules Langrishe, who was one of the ablest of his political opponents, and left it always open to the ministers to adopt his views.

It was the opinion of the leading Catholics that the initiative in abolishing the penal laws should be left with the Government. Grattan for a long time shared it, and he was very conscious that his own party was divided on the subject, and that it would be extremely

unfortunate if the Catholic question became a party question. The Irish Government, however, at this period was in the hands of men who were completely opposed to concession. The Catholic question, in their eyes, was not so much a religious question or a question of toleration as a question of the displacement of political power; an effort to break down the Treasury monopoly in Parliament; a new and dangerous form of that innovating spirit which they considered it their main task to oppose. The influence of the Dissenters of the north was soon felt in the Catholic Committee. In 1791 a formidable schism broke out in it. Lord Kenmare and more than sixty of the leading Catholic gentry seceded from it, and it began to fall wholly into democratic hands. A Dublin tradesman, named John Keogh, who long played a considerable part in Irish politics, became its guiding influence, and in numerous counties and large towns Catholic meetings were held, and resolutions carried supporting Keogh and censuring the seceders. Yet in the face of this new and growing movement the Government was absolutely hostile. In 1790 a loyal Catholic address, intended to be presented to the Lord Lieutenant, Lord Westmorland, on his visit to Cork, had been returned because it contained a hope that their loyalty would lead to a further relaxation of the penal code; and in the beginning of the following year a Catholic deputation to the Castle, asking for the repeal or modification of many of these laws, was dismissed without even the courtesy of an

answer.

In October 1791 the Catholic Committee issued a declaration, demanding in peremptory terms a complete abolition of the penal code, and in the beginning of 1792 they sent a deputation to England to lay their case before the King.

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A grave division of opinion now broke out between the Government of England and the Irish Government. It was the decided opinion of Pitt, Dundas, and Lord Grenville that the time had come when considerable concessions should be made to the Irish Catholics. They were all of them men without the smallest tinge of religious bigotry, and they were at the same time fully sensible of the new dangers that were arising from the French Revolution, and from the democratic propagandism and fanaticism which accompanied it. In their eyes the overtures the northern Dissenters were making to the Irish Catholics were full of danger, and it was of the utmost importance that the Catholics should look to Government and not elsewhere for support. In the great struggle that had broken out Catholicism appeared to them the most powerful moral influence opposed to the Revolution. All over Europe it was now the rallying point of Conservatism, and its overthrow was one of the first objects of the revolutionists. Burke, who had just seceded from the Whig party through his hostility to the Revolution, and who had lately published his 'Reflections' on that Revolution, the most profound and eloquent of all defences of the Conservative view of the Constitution, was the steady friend of the Catholics; and at a time when he was preaching with unrivalled power the danger of tampering with the framework of the existing British Constitution, he urged that the Constitution of Ireland could not be better strengthened than by introducing gradually and carefully a Catholic element of property and education into political life. The existing monopoly of political power in Ireland, he contended, could not continue, and to grantthough possibly under a somewhat higher qualification— votes to Catholic freeholders, and to give the Catholic gentry some share of political power, would be the best

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means of preserving the Irish Parliament from democratic and revolutionary change. He suffered his son to become the agent of the Catholics, and he advocated their cause steadily both in public and in private. A measure had recently been carried ameliorating the position of the English Catholics which, though it did not give them political power, made their position in some respects better than that of the Catholics in Ireland, and this formed another argument in favour of some concessions.

Under such circumstances, Dundas at the end of 1791 wrote to Lord Westmorland that, in the opinion of the English Government, the Catholic question should be seriously taken in hand. They were of opinion that all laws which obstructed Catholics in the exercise of any profession, trade, or manufacture; which restricted their intermarriage with Protestants; which interfered with the unlimited power of the Catholic father over the mode and place of the education of his children; which made a distinction between Protestant and Papist in the use of arms, and which prevented Papists from serving on grand or petty juries, should be absolutely repealed; and they at the same time submitted to the Irish Government the strong expediency of granting them a certain measure of voting power for county though not for borough elections.

These proposals were received by the Irish Government with absolute consternation. In letter after letter Lord Westmorland assured the ministers in England that any attempt to give the Irish Catholics a share in political power must lead to anarchy, and would probably end in separation; that it was of the utmost importance that the fact that the English ministers had ever entertained such a design should be concealed; that if they wished to carry it into effect they would be unable to do so, for the whole