cluded him from the House of Commons; but he had almost as little chance of obtaining a seat there as a man of color has of being chosen a senator of the United States. In fact, only one papist had been returned to the Irish Parliament since the Restoration. The whole legislative and executive power was in the hands of the colonists; and the ascendency of the ruling caste was upheld by a standing army of seven thousand men, on whose zeal for what was called the English interest full reliance could be placed.*

On a close scrutiny, it would have been found that neither the Irishry nor the Englishry formed a perfectly homogeneous body. The distinction between those Irish who were of Celtic blood, and those Irish who sprang from the followers of Strongbow and De Burgh, was not altogether effaced. The Fitzes sometimes permitted themselves to speak with scorn of the Os and Macs, and the Os and Macs sometimes repaid that scorn with aversion. In the preceding generation, one of the most powerful of the O'Neills refused to pay any mark of respect to a Roman Catholic gentleman of old Norman descent. "They say that the family has been here four hundred years. No matter. I hate the clown as if he had come yesterday." It seems, however, that such feelings were rare, and that the feud which had long raged between the aboriginal Celts and the degenerate English had nearly given place to the fiercer feud which separated both races from the modern and Protestant colony.

The colony had its own internal disputes, both national and religious. The majority was English; but a large minority came from the south of Scotland. One half of

the settlers belonged to the Established Church; the other half were Dissenters. But in Ireland, Scot and Southron were strongly bound together by their common Saxon origin. Churchman and Presbyterian were strongly bound

King, chap. iii., sec. 2.

+ Sheridan MS.; Preface to the first volume of the Hibernia Anglicana, 1690; Secret Consults of the Romish Party in Ireland, 1689.

together by their common Protestantism. All the colonists had a common language and a common pecuniary interest. They were surrounded by common enemies, and could be safe only by means of common precautions and exertions. The few penal laws, therefore, which had been made in Ireland against Protestant Nonconformists, were a dead letter.* The bigotry of the most sturdy Churchman would not bear exportation across St. George's Channel. As soon as the Cavalier arrived in Ireland, and found that, without the hearty and courageous assistance of his Puritan neighbors, he and all his family would run imminent risk of being murdered by rapparees, his hatred of Puritanism, in spite of himself, began to languish and die away. It was remarked by eminent men of both parties, that a Protestant who, in Ireland, was called a high Tory, would in England have been considered as a moderate Whig.†

The Protestant Nonconformists, on their side, endured with more patience than could have been expected the sight of the most absurd ecclesiastical establishment that the world has ever seen. Four archbishops and eighteen bishops were employed in looking after about a fifth part of the number of Churchmen who inhabited the single diocese of London. Of the parochial clergy a large proportion were pluralists, and resided at a distance from their cures. There were some who drew from their benefices incomes of little less than a thousand a year, without ever performing any spiritual function. Yet this monstrous

"There was a free liberty of conscience by connivance, though not by the law."-King, chap. iii., sec. 1.

In a letter to James found among Bishop Tyrrell's papers, and dated Aug. 14, 1686, are some remarkable expressions: "There are few or none Protestants in that country but such as are joined with the Whigs against the common enemy." And again: "Those that passed for Tories here" (that is, in England) "publicly espouse the Whig quarrel on the other side the water." Swift said the same thing to King William a few years later: "I remember when I was last in England I told the king that the highest Tories we had with us would make tolerable Whigs there.”—Letter concerning the Sacramental Test.

institution was much less disliked by the Puritans settled in Ireland than the Church of England by the English sectaries; for in Ireland religious divisions were subordinate to national divisions; and the Presbyterian, while, as a theologian, he could not but condemn the established hierarchy, yet looked on that hierarchy with a sort of complacency when he considered it as a sumptuous and ostentatious trophy of the victory achieved by the great race from which he sprang.*

Thus the grievances of the Irish Roman Catholic had hardly any thing in common with the grievances of the English Roman Catholic. The Roman Catholic of Lancashire or Staffordshire had only to turn Protestant, and he was at once, in all respects, on a level with his neighbors; but if the Roman Catholics of Munster and Connaught had turned Protestants, they would still have continued to be a subject people. Whatever evils the Roman Catholic suffered in England were the effects of harsh legislation, and might have been remedied by a more liberal legislation; but between the two populations which inhabited Ireland there was an inequality which legislation had not caused and could not remove. The dominion which one of those populations exercised over the other was the dominion of wealth over poverty, of knowledge over ignorance, of civilized over uncivilized man.

James himself seemed, at the commencement of his reign, to be perfectly aware of these truths. The distractions of Ireland, he said, arose, not from the differences between the Catholics and the Protestants, but from the differences between the Irish and the English.† The consequences which he should have drawn from this just proposition were sufficiently obvious; but, unhappily for himself and for Ireland, he failed to perceive them.

* The wealth and negligence of the established clergy of Ireland are mentioned in the strongest terms by the Lord Lieutenant Clarendon, a most unexceptionable witness.

+ Clarendon reminds the king of this in a letter dated March 14, 1685. "It certainly is," Clarendon adds, a most true notion."

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If only national animosity could be allayed, there could be little doubt that religious animosity, not being kept alive, as in England, by cruel penal acts and stringent test acts, would of itself fade away. To assuage a national animosity such as that which the two races inhabiting Ireland felt for each other could not be the work of a few years; yet it was a work to which a wise and good prince might have contributed much, and James would have undertaken that work with advantages such as none of his predecessors or successors possessed. At once an Englishman and a Roman Catholic, he belonged half to the ruling and half to the subject caste, and was therefore peculiarly qualified to be a mediator between them. Nor is it dif ficult to trace the course which he ought to have pursued. He ought to have determined that the existing settlement of landed property should be inviolable; and he ought to have announced that determination in such a manner as effectually to quiet the anxiety of the new proprietors, and to extinguish any wild hopes which the old proprietors might entertain. Whether, in the great transfer of estates, injustice had or had not been committed, was immaterial. That transfer, just or unjust, had taken place so long ago that to reverse it would be to unfix the foundations of society. There must be a time of limitation to all rights. After thirty-five years of actual possession, after twenty-five years of possession solemnly guaranteed by statute, after innumerable leases and releases, mortgages and devises, it was too late to search for flaws in titles. Nevertheless, something might have been done to heal the lacerated feelings and to raise the fallen fortunes of the Irish gentry. The colonists were in a thriving condition. They had greatly improved their property by building, planting, and fencing. The rents had almost doubled within a few years; trade was brisk; and the revenue, amounting to about three hundred thousand pounds a year, more than defrayed all the charges of the local government, and afforded a surplus which was remitted to England. There was no doubt that the next Parliament

which should meet at Dublin, though representing almost exclusively the English interest, would, in return for the king's promise to maintain that interest in all its legal rights, have willingly granted to him a very considerable sum for the purpose of indemnifying, at least in part, such native families as had been 'wrongfully despoiled. It was thus that in our own time the French government put an end to the disputes engendered by the most extensive confiscation that ever took place in Europe; and thus, if James had been guided by the advice of his most loyal Protestant counselors, he would have at least greatly mitigated one of the chief evils which afflicted Ireland.*

Having done this, he should have labored to reconcile the hostile races to each other by impartially protecting the rights and restraining the excesses of both. He should have punished with equal severity the native who indulged in the license of barbarism, and the colonist who abused the strength of civilization. As far as the legitimate authority of the crown extended-and in Ireland it extended far-no man who was qualified for office by integrity and ability should have been considered as disqualified by extraction or by creed for any public trust. It is probable that a Roman Catholic king, with an ample revenue absolutely at his disposal, would, without much difficulty, have secured the co-operation of the Roman Catholic prelates and priests in the great work of reconciliation. Much, however, must still have been left to the healing influence of time. The native race would still have had to learn from the colonists industry and forethought, the arts of life, and the language of England. There could not be equality between men who lived in houses and men who lived in sties, between men who were fed on bread and men who were fed on potatoes, between men who spoke the noble tongue of great philosophers and poets and men who, with a perverted pride, boasted that they could not

* Clarendon strongly recommended this course, and was of opinion that the Irish Parliament would do its part. See his letter to Ormond, Aug. 28,