THE PENAL LAWS 17 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 on a large scale honestly and efficiently, and without the admixture of a sectarian element, it would have been a priceless benefit to Ireland. It would probably have done more good than any political measure that could have been devised. Unfortunately, however, it was part of the scheme that the pupils in the Charter schools should be brought up as Protestants. The schools were looked on in consequence with abhorrence by those who needed them most, and although they were largely and even lavishly subsidised, and through a long succession of years constantly recommended by the Lord Lieutenant, they were practically useless, and were suffered to fall into abuses that were conspicuous even in the dreary history of Irish jobbery and maladministration. Military discipline, which serves some of the purposes of education, and of which the Irish have always been very evidently susceptible, was forbidden them by their exclusion from the army. Nearly all the incentives to ambition were withheld, and every VOL. I. 2 field of Irish life was thickly sown with disqualifications or monopolies. Agriculture was necessarily the main industry of the people, but they were excluded from its great prizes. In commercial and industrial life Irish Catholics often made considerable fortunes, but they were not allowed to invest their savings in mortgages on land, and this fact greatly limited the sums that should have been expended in agricultural improvement. But deeper and more far-reaching than any mere material evil was the effect of the penal laws upon the character of the people. Unlike the other great persecutions in history, they were directed not against a dissentient minority, but against the vast majority of the nation. There were, indeed, two distinct nations in Ireland, differing in race, in creed, and in a great degree in language, opposed to each other in interests, sympathies, and traditions, and the penal laws tended powerfully at once to make this difference indelible, and to give the smaller nation the vices of monopolists and the larger nation the vices of slaves. The Catholics emerged from them, it is true, with many virtues. There was an unusually high standard of domestic purity-there was an intense fervour of religious belief -there was a truly admirable spirit of content and resignation in extreme poverty as well as amid the inevitable calamities of life, and there was much and beautiful mutual charity among the poor. But if the domestic and the religious virtues were prominent in the national type, no people in Europe were more destitute of the political and the industrial ones. The lawabiding spirit; the respect for authority; the spirit of compromise; the self-abnegation of a really genuine patriotism; the high standard of honesty and truthfulness, seriousness and integrity in politics, which is the THE PENAL LAWS 19 first condition of sound and healthy self-government, were utterly wanting, and the industrial qualities that lead to wealth and diffused comfort were scarcely less Those are equally uncandid who deny the profound degradation of the Irish character, and disregard the causes to which that degradation may be largely attributed. So. I have elsewhere examined in detail the manner in which the penal laws were enforced. In a slight sketch like this I must confine myself to a few general remarks. There is an extreme and most remarkable difference between different periods of eighteenth century history in this respect. The enactments of the Irish Parliament in the first quarter of the century display a fierce and savage intolerance and an intense desire to crush the Catholic population to the dust. In the second quarter of the century this spirit had almost disappeared, and constant infractions of the penal code were permitted with general connivance. In some cases, landed properties of Catholics that would have otherwise been divided were held together under the names of Protestants, and although this trust had no sanction beyond that of honour, it was never, or scarcely ever, abused. Protestants, at the request of a Catholic parent, undertook the legal guardianship of Catholic children on the understanding that their education should be left in the hands of a Catholic relative. The professions were full of nominal conformists, who in their private lives practised their old religion without molestation. The worship of the Catholics was celebrated without pomp, but without hindrance. Catholic 'Hedge Schools' became numerous, and there were complaints that Protestants assisted Catholics in retaining arms. Much must, no doubt, be attributed to the impossibility of enforcing the code in the midst of a population in which the vast majority were Catholics, but it is also clear that magistrates in general discouraged informers; and in the latter part of the century Protestants in Ireland showed themselves more liberal than Protestants in England in their dealings with Catholics. Pure religious fanaticism does not, indeed, appear to have ever played a dominant part in this legislation. The object of the penal laws even in the worst period was much less to produce a change of religion than to secure property and power by reducing to complete impotence those who had formerly possessed them, and who might by a turn of the political wheel regain them. The passion that mixed with this legislation was much less the passion of genuine religious enthusiasm than the hatred produced by a long period of savage civil war. The predominant fear of the Irish Parliament in the first years of the century was that property under the Act of Settlement should become insecure. Thus the Parliament voted a resolution against a proposal for the reversal of outlawries from the rebellions of 1641 and 1688, presented an address against the restoration of some of the estates of Lord Clanricarde, defeated an English proposal to reverse the attainder of Lord Clancarty, and passed resolutions declaring that any attempt to disturb the Protestant purchasers of estates forfeited by rebellion would be of dangerous consequence to his Majesty's person and government. During the earlier period of the century, the English Government was more favourable to the Catholics than the Irish Parliament, and it more than once used its influence to temper the legislation against them. But the religious temperature in the beginning of the eighteenth century was not high, and it was no doubt THE IRISH JACOBITES 21 lowered by the large number of ostensible conformists in Ireland. The penal laws, however mischievous in other respects, at least attained their immediate end. The country was perfectly quiet. In every period of foreign war and of Jacobite danger it was found possible to withdraw a great portion of the Irish army, and for some eighty years Ireland gave England absolutely no trouble. It was certainly not surprising that in the struggle of the Revolution the Irish Catholics should have taken the side of the Catholic sovereign, of whom they at least had nothing to complain; but Jacobitism in Ireland had never any deep root, and it was wholly different from the sentiment which played so great a part in Scotch history. To the Scotchman it meant the cause of a national dynasty closely associated with the fortunes and the glory of his country. The fact that a Scotch sovereign mounted the British throne had alone made the union of the two crowns tolerable to the weaker and poorer people. In Ireland no such associations existed. The Stuarts were a foreign dynasty, with no hold on the affections of the people; with no part in any page of their history to which they could look back with pleasure. James I. was chiefly associated in the Irish mind with the abolition of the tribal rights and the great confiscations in Ulster; Charles I. with the oppression and fraud of Strafford and the ghastly scenes of carnage and desolation that followed the outbreak of 1641; Charles II. with the Act of Settlement, and the great fraud which deprived a vast portion of the old Catholic loyal gentry of their proprietary rights. If the Catholicism of James II. kindled some faint sympathy in Ireland it was at least far short of enthusiasm, and his conduct there, especially after the battle of the Boyne, was certainly not calculated to stimulate it. An Irish poet described him as a king |