COMMERCIAL DISABILITIES

7

increased and the demand for land grew it was carried out to a ruinous extent.

The greatest of all discouragements to the Protestant interest was to be found in the commercial disabilities which destroyed the chief articles of Irish industry. This policy had begun under the later Stuarts when, to prevent Irish competition in the English market, the export from Ireland to England of cattle, sheep and swine, of beef, pork, bacon, mutton, butter and cheese was forbidden, and when under an amended' Navigation Act Ireland was excluded, at first partially and then altogether, from all direct trade with the English colonies. She was thus deprived of the chief benefit she might have derived from the excellent pasture land and the excellent harbours which were the two great advantages nature had bestowed on her. After the Revolution the commercial classes acquired a greatly increased strength, and the result was the total destruction of the Irish woollen trade. The laws prohibiting the export of cattle had led the proprietors in Ireland to lay out their land in sheep walks, and the unusual excellence of Irish wool and the cheapness of Irish labour had laid the foundation of an important manufacture, which was carried on mainly by Protestants. Many English, Scotch, and even foreign manufacturers came over to take part in it. There was every prospect that this manufacture would attain considerable magnitude, and as it was certain for many years to be mainly Protestant, it would have greatly strengthened the Protestant interest in Ireland. Unfortunately there was an important woollen manufacture in England, and it soon took the alarm. Irish woollen manufactures were already excluded by prohibitory duties from the English market, and the Irish were now forbidden to send their manufactured wool not only to the English colonies, but also to any foreign country, or their raw wool to any

NB

country except England, where it might be useful for the English manufacturer. The rising industry was thus absolutely blasted. Nothing but the small home market remained. A great portion of the most industrious and enterprising population in Ireland fled from the country, and a fatal discouragement fell on those who remained. It was clearly shown by this and by several other minor enactments that it was the wish, and that it was within the power, of the English Parliament to crush any Irish industry that could possibly compete with an English one. There were, it is true, some slight and intermittent efforts made to foster the linen trade as a compensation, by admitting some branches of it to the English market and even encouraging it by bounties, but this was wholly insufficient to counteract the evil that had been done.

The commercial policy of England was not an isolated thing, for the subordination of the interests of dependencies to the interests of the dominant country would then have been accepted as a general maxim throughout Europe, and was practised by every maritime power with such possessions. But its effects in Ireland were peculiarly disastrous. It not only immensely aggravated the deplorable poverty of the country, but it had a permanent influence of the most far-reaching kind. It broke down the Protestant interest and the industrial spirit which it should have been the first object of England to support. It tended to throw the whole population for subsistence on the soil, and thus gave agrarian disturbances the peculiarly bitter and persistent character they have ever assumed, and it called into being a vast smuggling trade in Irish wool exported to the Continent which was one of the most powerful means of educating the people into hostility to the law.

It must be added that the evil was much aggravated by the hostility that subsisted between the Scotch Presby

THE IRISH PRESBYTERIANS

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terians who were so powerful in the North and the dominant and established Episcopalian Protestant Church. The Presbyterians, it is true, were not like the Catholics excluded by law from the Parliament, and from the times of Charles II. their ministers had even a small endowment from English funds, which in the eighteenth century was considerably augmented, but their political power bore no proportion to their number, their energy, or their wealth. In the House of Lords they were absolutely, or almost absolutely, unrepresented, and the absenteeism of great numbers of the lay lords had given the bishops an overwhelming power. In the House of Commons there was a group of Presbyterian members, but it was very small. Presbyterians were extremely rare among the landed gentry, and a Test Act was in force which excluded them from town corporations. This most unfortunate Act had a curious history. It was tacked by a Tory English Government in 1704 to an Irish Bill against Popery, and according to the Irish Constitution, the only alternative of the Irish Parliament was to accept this clause which it had not asked for, or to reject the Bill as a whole. It was then in a strongly anti-popery mood and it adopted the former alternative. Soon after, Whig Governments became supreme in England, and they would have gladly abolished the test in Ireland, but they found it impossible to induce the Irish Parliament to adopt such a measure. Swift had written powerfully against the repeal; the bishops commanded a majority in the House of Lords, and the Northern Presbyterians, who were in close touch with their brethren in Scotland, were very far from being themselves a tolerant or a conciliatory body. The English Toleration Act of William was not extended to Ireland, and it was accompanied by limitations and restrictions which the Irish Presbyterians scornfully repudiated, but in 1719 they obtained a larger Toleration Act like that in

Scotland. There were still several restrictions which were only gradually removed, and it was not till the latter half of the eighteenth century that the Presbyterians obtained a release from all real grievances. This relief, however, did not produce any complete harmony of sects. The Episcopalian and the Presbyterian elements still remained separate, jealous and hostile, and both at the time of the War of the American Revolution and in the early days of the French Revolution, Presbyterian disaffection was one of the most serious dangers to the government of Ireland.

While Protestantism was thus weakened and divided the Catholics were crushed by the penal laws. In judging these laws large allowance must be made, not only for the intolerance of religious dissent which at the end of the seventeenth and in the beginning of the eighteenth century was the prevailing spirit in nearly all European legislation, but also for the very peculiar circumstances of Ireland. A long succession of savage civil wars had aroused the fiercest passions, and they had been accompanied or followed by gigantic confiscations of land. Most of the landed property in Ireland was held under a recent Act of Settlement which was based on confiscation, which had been repealed by the Jacobite Parliament of 1689 in the short period of its ascendency, and which would no doubt have been again overthrown if the Catholic party regained their power. Under such circumstances it was inevitable that some disabling, disarming and incapacitating laws against the Catholics should have been carried by the Protestant Parliament, though it is no less certain that the provisions of the penal code went far beyond what was needed; that many of them tended powerfully to degrade and demoralise, and that a large proportion of the code was a distinct violation of the arrangement which had been come to by the leaders of the two parties at the time of the surrender of

Limerick, and to which the English Government was distinctly pledged. The Irish legislation against Catholics greatly resembled and was probably largely influenced by the French laws against the Huguenots, and on the whole the Irish legislation was less stringently enforced. Certainly as far as the part of the code directed against religion was concerned, this was the case. In France many hundreds of Protestants were sent to the galleys for no other crime than attending a Protestant service, and not a few Protestant ministers were hanged. In Ireland the public worship of the Catholics was proscribed by law. The priests were often hunted from their parishes and sometimes imprisoned or sent out of the country, and in times of apprehended danger orders were given to enforce laws that were otherwise almost obsolete.

The object of the Legislature was, no doubt, to make Ireland eventually a Protestant country, but the days had gone by when, as in the decades that followed the Reformation, whole nations changed their creed in obedience to the civil power, and there was nothing of the steady persecuting spirit which in the sixteenth century crushed resistance. During about thirty years the celebration of the Catholic worship was carried on under great difficulties. Priests, it is true, were registered and had a right of celebrating it in their own parishes, but the liberty they enjoyed was much limited not only by a crowd of humiliating restrictions, but also by the direction that they must take an oath of abjuration of the Stuarts, which their superiors condemned. Much worship seems to have been conducted either by unregistered priests or by priests who had not taken the oath of abjuration, and Catholic bishops and other dignitaries incurred great danger in coming to Ireland. They, as well as all monks or friars, were liable to be first imprisoned and then banished, and if they returned after banishment