where he had heard mass, who had officiated, and who had been present at it, and, in case of a refusal to comply, a fine of £20 was to be imposed, or, in default, twelve months' imprisonment. For the discovery of an archbishop, bishop, vicar-general, or other person exercising ecclesiastical jurisdiction the informer was to receive £50; for any monk or friar, or secular clergyman not duly registered, £20; for every Papist school-teacher or tutor, 10. For a first offence an ecclesiastic was transported; and if any bishop who had once been transported was found in Ireland again, he was to be hanged. In the same year the scheme originated of inducing Protestant foreigners to go to Ireland, and offering them the benefits of naturalization, with a view of strengthening the Protestant element in the country and giving an impulse to industry. Eight hundred and seventy-one Protestant Palatine families were brought over from Germany, and twenty-four thousand eight hundred and fifty pounds five shillings and sixpence appointed for their maintenance out of the revenue. But the scheme, as might have been expected from its artificial nature, turned out a ridiculous fiasco, as Swift wittily observed" It appeared manifestly, by the issue, that the public was a loser by every individual amongst them; and that a kingdom can no more be the richer for such an importation than a man can be fatter by a wen."

In 1713 an order was made in the Irish House of Commons, "that the Sergeant-at-Arms should take into custody all Papists that were or should presume to come into the galleries." This, though a feather in the balance of the other disabilities, evinces the temper of the times. Every man's hand was against the Catholics. They were pariahs, they were helots, they were worse than helots, for the general scheme of Irish society did not presume them to exist. Debarred from so much, they could hardly take a step without transgressing one of the penal laws, and the watch-dogs were ever on the alert to proclaim any encroachment upon Protestant privilege.1

This scorpion legislation, however, was not yet complete. Mobilitate vigit, viresque acquirit eundo. An Act of George I

1 Burke, comparing this mass of persecution to the Edict of Nantes, wrote in Tracts on the Popery Laws—

"this act of injustice, which let loose on that monarch such a torrent of invective and reproach, and which threw so dark a cloud over all the splendour of a most illustrious reign, falls far short of the case in Ireland. The privileges, which the Protestants of that kingdom enjoyed antecedent to this revocation, were far greater than the Roman Catholics of Ireland ever aspired to under a contrary establishment. The number of their sufferers, if considered absolutely, is not half of ours; if considered relatively to the body of each community, it is not, perhaps, a twentieth part. And then the penalties and incapacities, which grew from that revocation, are not so grievous in their nature, nor so certain in their execution, nor so ruinous, by a great deal, to the civil prosperity of the State, as those which we have established for a perpetual law in our unhappy country."

disabled Papists from serving in the Irish Militia, but with a refinement of insult worthy of the descendant of those laws which convicted on the evidence of Titus Oates, compelled them to find Protestant substitutes, and to pay double towards the support of the force. The same Act also rendered their horses liable to seizure for Militia purposes. In 1719 a tediously elaborate Bill was introduced in the Irish House of Commons for the prevention of any one married to a Catholic wife from holding any office under the Government, or a convert from holding any office or practising as a solicitor or attorney for seven years after his conversion, and not even after that period of time unless he were able to produce a certificate showing that he had received the Sacrament three times in each year of the seven. This measure, one of the clauses of which sentenced all unregistered priests found in Ireland to be branded upon the cheek with a red-hot iron, was carried through the Irish House without any opposition. The Irish Privy Council, however, gravely changed the penalty of branding into that of castration, and sent this unparalleled Bill to England for ratification. But the Ministry shrank from a precedent that through unexpected vicissitudes of fortune might some day be turned against themselves, and overflowing with the milk of human kindness, restored without a dissentient note the mild penalty of branding. The Bill, nevertheless, was eventually thrown out by the Irish House of Lords, not on account of the brutality of its provisions, but on a minor and quite different issue.

Primate Boulter1 now became the evil genius of Catholic persecution. On the 9th of March, 1731, it was resolved unanimously through his influence "that it is the indispensable duty of all magistrates and officers to put the laws made to prevent the further growth of Popery in due execution," and "that Members of that House, in their respective counties and stations would use their utmost endeavours to put the several laws against Popery in due execution." By acts passed in George II's reign the Papists were, through the same baneful influence, disfranchised: Roman Catholics were disqualified from practising as solicitors, the only branch of the profession of the law that had been left to them; barristers or solicitors marrying Papists were to be deemed Papists; all marriages between Protestants and Papists were annulled; and Popish priests celebrating any illegal marriages were to be hanged. Lastly, by an Act of George III, Papists refusing to deliver up or declare their arms were liable to be placed in the pillory or to be whipped, as the Court should think proper.

Such were the Irish Penal Laws. Devoured by a satyriasis

1 Hugh Boulter (1672-1742), Archbishop of Armagh.

of coercion, the Parliament, like some wild beast of the forest, had grown gluttonous upon what it fed. Having once tasted of cruelty it could not leave it alone, and the mania of proscription was only arrested when a great volume of public opinion rose up and barred the way. A few Roman Catholics, more witty than conscientious, deserted their own faith and became Protestants, pleading, as did Mr. Myers of Roscommon, as the "grounds" of his conversion, 2,500 acres of the best ground in the county of Roscommon. And yet the rulers of Erin were a Christian people and their country a Christian country-a people who prided themselves upon the advanced state of their civilization, and held themselves to be the true and only type of what a nation of gentlemen should be. How transparently thin, how indecently insufficient is the civilized veneer over the natural savagery of man.1

Having sufficiently sketched the outlines of the Penal Code, we will now proceed to the history of its reform. Gradually, not from remorse, but from shame at the nakedness of its wickedness and fear at the consequences of its continuance, the Penal Code was modified. The curtain was at last to be lifted before the astonished gaze of Christian gentlemen who did not realize the full enormity of the Penal Code until the discussions took place over the clauses that were to be abolished. Two factors now ranged themselves upon the side of the Catholics in their struggle with Protestantism,—namely, the fear engendered in the hearts of the rulers of Ireland by the possibility of foreign complications, and the strife for supremacy which was now almost for the first time waged between the Ascendency and the English Government. In 1759 the Catholic Committee was formed in Dublin to sustain the Catholic cause. On the 25th of November, 1763, Mason2 introduced a Bill to empower Papists to lend money on real securities. The measure was opposed by Le Hunte on the ground that it would tend to make Papists proprietors of a great part of the property of the kingdom, and was finally postponed until 1764, when it was rejected by a majority of 44. About this time a supposed Catholic conspiracy was employed by the Protestants of Ireland for the purpose of supplying an excuse for measures of peculiar severity against the Papists. Several Catholics of eminent character were hanged without a particle of evidence to support the accusations levelled against them, and informers drawn from the dregs of the people, such as strumpets, pimps, pickpockets, and common sharpers, were taken from the prisons and placed in the box as

1 Appendix XIX, quotations from Arthur Young, Edmund Burke, Sir William Blackstone, R. B. Sheridan, George Canning, Henry Grattan, Sir George Cornewall Lewis, and Matthew Arnold.

2 John Monck Mason, Shakespearean commentator (1726-1809).

witnesses against men whom perhaps they had never seen or even heard of. In 1766 occurred the execution of the Reverend Nicholas Sheehy, the parish priest of Clogheen, a village situated in the valley between the Galtees and the range of Knockmaoldown, in Tipperary. He had ventured to denounce Church rates as an iniquitous imposition, and his parishioners had in consequence refused to pay them. He had then proceeded to denounce also the payment of the tithes of two Protestant clergymen which were farmed to a tithe-proctor of the name of Dobbyn. Several years passed, but the Government had snuffed his blood and did not forget Sheehy. He was tried various times on different false charges, but they could not trip him up. At length in 1765 he was indicted for rebellion, but again acquitted, although the bribed evidence of a common prostitute and of a convicted thief were brought against him. He was next accused of the murder of an informer of the name of Bridge, whose evidence in some recent riots had been the cause of various executions, and, although the body of the latter was never found, nor a shred of evidence produced, he was convicted and hanged, and his head spiked over the gates of Clonmel Jail.1

In 1768 a Bill for the mitigation of the Penal Code was introduced and passed without a division in the Irish Parliament, but it was lost in England. Three years later, in 1771, a fresh allurement was held out to the Catholic priest to change his Popish shackles for the free breath of Protestantism. A provision had been made in one of Anne's Acts that every Catholic priest, who became a convert, should receive £30 a year for his maintenance, until provided with some ecclesiastical preferment beyond that amount. But it had been found, contrary to the usual laws of human nature, that the Catholic most foolishly preferred his slave's gyves to the proffered liberty, and the Government had therefore kept its money and been obliged to swallow its annoyance. By the Act of 1771 it was enacted that a sum of £40 should in future be allowed annually, in lieu of £30, to every convert from the Roman faith; the additional sums of £10 each, "Townshend's golden drops," as they were called, being levied on the inhabitants of the district, wherein the convert last resided; a policy which defeated itself, for a strong inducement was in this manner held out to every district not to contribute a single convert for the fear of being taxed. The same year an Act was passed permitting Papists to hold on lease fifty plantation acres

1 Small wonder that Burke wrote, in 1782, in a Letter to a Peer of Ireland"I was three times in Ireland, from the year 1760 to the year 1767, where I had sufficient means of information concerning the inhuman proceedings (among which were many cruel murders, besides an infinity of outrages and oppressions, unknown before in a civilized age) which prevailed during that period, in consequence of a pretended conspiracy among Roman Catholics against the King's Governnient.'

of unprofitable and unwholesome bog, and half-an-acre of arable land adjoining as a site for a house, or for the purpose of digging gravel or limestone for manure. The tenant was to be free for the first seven years from all tithes and cesses; but it was provided that if half the bog were not reclaimed at the end of twenty-one years the lease should be void. No bog was to be considered unprofitable, unless the depth of it from the surface, when reclaimed, were four feet at least; and no person was to be entitled to the benefit of the Act, unless he reclaimed a minimum of ten plantation acres. The Act, moreover, was not to extend to any bog within one mile of a city or market-town. On the 9th of November, 1773, leave was given to bring in the heads of a Bill to enable Papists, on certain conditions, to take leases of lives, lands, tenements, and hereditaments; and on the 10th of the same month further permission was given to introduce the heads of a Bill to secure the repayment to Catholics of loans advanced by them to Protestants on mortgages of lands, tenements and hereditaments; but neither of the measures were proceeded with at the time. In 1774 an oath of allegiance was framed to meet their religious objections, a concession which, immaterial in itself, was a proof that the tide had at last begun to turn. But this dribble of reform did scarcely any good. The spirit of religious intolerance was as bitter as ever, and spread itself through every relation in life. None felt it more than the Catholic tenant upon his holding-the man upon whom of all others the prosperity of the Irish race depended, and whom the Protestant Ascendency should have striven to conciliate. He was treated as a different being to his Protestant fellow occupier, and might consider his circumstances fortunate, if he were permitted to live upon the land at all.1

By this time the American war had commenced, and it was thought advisable, when unforeseen dangers were menacing the rulers of Ireland, to conciliate with a little kindness the inhabitants of an island so near their own shores. Coerced at Saratoga into a sense of their inefficiency, the courage of the Government began to ebb and their intolerance to lose its backbone. In these circumstances was passed the first great Catholic Relief

1 Arthur Young describes the case of one of these improving "Popish " tenants"July 4th-Lord Longford carried me to a Mr. Marly's, an improver in the neighbourhood, who had done great things, and without the benefit of such leases as Protestants in Ireland commonly have." (He then describes how greatly Marly had improved his land, and how the rent had been raised in consequence.)

"It was with regret I heard that the rent of a man who had been so spirited an improver should be raised so exceedingly. He merited for his life the returns of his industry. But the cruel laws against the Roman Catholics of this country remain the marks of illiberal barbarism. Why should not the industrious man have a spur to his industry, whatever be his religion? . . . It is impossible that the industry of a nation should have its material progress where four-fifths of the people are cut off from these advantages which are heaped upon the domineering aristocracy of the remainder."