to be put to death, and considerable rewards were offered for their detection and conviction. At the same time the worship did go on; attempts to suppress it were rare, partial and intermittent, and long before the laws against Catholic worship were repealed they had become a dead letter. But the effect of those laws was to deprive law in Ireland of all moral sanction by bringing it into direct conflict with religion. The religious teachers were an illegal class, liable to banishment, and in some cases if they returned from banishment to death, and although the code was never enforced to the extreme penalty, it was quite sufficient to prevent any orderly ecclesiastical government in the Catholic Church, and to place religious teaching in the hands of an ignorant, fanatical and lawless priesthood. Catholicism was not extirpated or seriously diminished, and after the first twenty-five or thirty years of the century it was as a form of worship practically unmolested. But it was degraded in its character, and it became far more dangerous to the peace of the country than if it had been fully recognised.

The laws against property, however, were in a great degree automatic and they worked with terrible effect. One of their most serious effects was that nearly all Catholics of ability and energy abandoned either their country or their faith. A considerable number whose convictions were not strong conformed to the Established. creed. The eldest son of a Catholic landlord thus kept his family property together. If he did not do so his estate was divided equally between himself and his brothers. The whole profession of the law was closed to Catholics, and very many conformed in order to practise it, or to escape a crowd of irritating, oppressive, and for the most part very useless restrictions which followed them into nearly every department of industrial life. There were

laws preventing a dying Catholic parent from leaving to a Catholic the guardianship of his child; freeing the wife or child of a Catholic who conformed to Protestantism from the control of the husband or father, and giving them special rights in his property; making it highly penal for any Protestant to marry a Catholic, and annulling all such marriages if celebrated by a Catholic priest; securing an annuity to any priest who abandoned his faith; encouraging informers by rewards, limiting the number of apprentices a Catholic manufacturer might have; excluding Catholics from Limerick and Galway, from town corporations and from vestries; obliging them to pay a special tax called quarterage for pursuing their industries in towns, to pay double to the militia, to reimburse in case of war with a Catholic Power the damage done by the enemies' privateers. An absurd and insulting law, which also existed in England, forbade a Catholic to have a horse worth more than 57., and enabled a Protestant by tendering 51. to seize his horse.

Most of these laws created a resentment utterly out of proportion to any good result they could possibly produce. They offered an unprincipled Catholic many bribes for conformity, and they gave both a lax Catholic and a dishonest Protestant numerous opportunities for fraud. Very naturally the conforming Catholics lost their influence over their co-religionists, while the best and most energetic members of the creed emigrated to the Continent, filled the armies of France, Spain, and Austria, and not unfrequently rose to high positions in the civil services of those countries. If the position of an educated Catholic at home was not intolerable, it was because law was systematically violated or evaded. But in spite of all evasion the lines of division both in creed and class were extremely deep, and above all deep in

landed property. The belief which was general in the eighteenth century that political power should be mainly in the hands of the possessors of landed property was naturally peculiarly strong in Ireland, and while one branch of the code caused the small portion of the land which was in Catholic hands to crumble into small parts or to pass to the conforming heir, another part prevented the Catholics from buying land, or inheriting it from Protestants, or acquiring land tenures that were nearly equivalent to ownership. They could not hold a lease for more than thirty-one years, or any lease under which the profits of the land exceeded one-third of the rent. Any Catholic leaseholder who, by his skill or industry made his profits exceed this proportion, was liable to forfeit his farm to any Protestant who made the discovery. It would be difficult to conceive a provision better calculated to discourage industry or to encourage systematic evasion of the law. Education could only be legally obtained through Protestant sources. The popish schoolmaster was especially regarded with suspicion, and many such men were imprisoned or banished, and, by a refinement of tyranny, Catholics were forbidden to have private tutors of their own creed or to send their children to be educated abroad. The term common enemy' was frequently applied in official documents to the great majority of the Irish people, and industrious habits among them were steadily discouraged by laws which deprived them of nearly all opportunities of education and wealth.

This was not a persecution like that which extirpated, by the death of fire, Protestantism and Judaism from Spain, nor was it enforced with the same stringent severity by which all Protestant worship was forbidden and suppressed in other Catholic countries of Europe and America. But looked at in its social and political aspects

it had effects more disastrous than many very sanguinary persecutions. If it had turned Ireland into a Protestant country it would have at least raised it in the scale of civilisation, but, failing in this, it degraded both a creed and a nation. The full evil was not felt till later times, but it was then clearly seen how irreparable it had been. The great mass of the Irish Catholics had been at a very low stage of civilisation at the time of the Revolution, and the circumstances of their history had been very unfavourable, but the penal laws effectually barred their natural progress. Those who ought to have been their leaders and guides were either driven from the country or degraded by an insincere conformity to the prevailing creed. An essentially vicious social type was created in which the divisions between rich and poor, between landlord and tenant, between governor and governed in every grade coincided with a difference of religion, and which directly tended to strengthen and perpetuate the memories and traditions of race hostility. Education, and especially education in the practical work of an agriculturist's or trader's life, was what was most needed if the people were to be drilled into a sober, law-abiding, civilised community. The English sovereigns of the time of the Reformation had been fully conscious of this, and they had provided a system of education in Ireland which, if the Irish had accepted the English rule and the English creed might have completely transformed the country. Henry VIII. had enacted that every clergyman should take an oath when instituted to a benefice in Ireland that he would keep within his parish an English-speaking school, providing' such convenient stipend or salary as in the same land accustomably used to be taken.' Elizabeth ordered the establishment of a free school under an English teacher in 1 28 Henry VIII. c. 15.

every diocese. She vested the nomination of schoolmasters in the bishop or in some cases in the lord deputy; she enacted that a third of the salary should be provided by the Ordinary and the other two-thirds by the clergy of the diocese, and the language of the statute clearly shows that this was intended not for a mere English settlement but to put an end to the deplorable and barbarous ignorance of the Irish people.1 But all this educational machinery failed to reach those for whom it was intended. The vast mass of the people remained Catholic and unEnglish. The funds that were provided were shamefully wasted or misapplied, and it was quite evident that education in a Catholic country could not be left, as it was chiefly left in England, to a Protestant Established Church. Some distinguished Irishmen recognised this, and in the course of the century several Irish landlords laboured seriously, and not without result, to raise the standard of knowledge around them.

If the Irish Parliament had taken this question earnestly and efficiently in hand; if it had made it its first object to give the Catholics a sound, practical, purely secular education, excluding on the one hand all proselytism and on the other all priestly interference, it would have left a blessed memory behind it. Scotland was once quite as destitute of the best qualities of civilisation as Ireland, and it is to the Scotch schools that the regeneration of Scotland is mainly due. But the Irish Parliament not only neglected its duty. It closed the door against every kind of education the Catholics would accept. A system of education called Charter schools, indeed, was set up by Primate Boulter, with the object of giving at the public expense a sound and essentially industrial and agricultural education to the Irish poor. If such a scheme had been carried out

12 Elizabeth, c. 1.