mental test and the declaration against transubstantiation were unknown; nor was either house of parliament closed against any religious sect.

It might seem, therefore, that the Irish Roman Catholic was in a situation which his English and Scottish brethren in the faith might well envy. In fact, however, his condition was more pitiable and irritating than theirs. For, though not persecuted as a Roman Catholic, he was oppressed as an Irishman. In his country the same line of demarcation which separated religions separated races; and he was of the conquered, the subjugated, the degraded race. On the same soil dwelt two populations, locally intermixed, morally and politically sundered. The difference of religion was by no means the only difference, and was perhaps not even the chief difference which existed between them. They sprang from different stocks. They spoke different languages. They had different national characters as strongly opposed as any two national characters in Europe. They were in widely different stages of civilization. There could therefore be little sympathy between them; and centuries of calamities and wrongs had generated a strong antipathy. The relation in which the minority stood to the majority resembled the relation in which the followers of William the Conqueror stood to the Saxon churls, or the relation in which the followers of Cortes stood to the Indians of Mexico. The appellation of Irish was then given exclusively to the Celts and to those families which, though not of Celtic origin, had in the course of ages degenerated into Celtic manners. These people, probably somewhat under a million in number, had, with few exceptions, adhered to the Church of Rome. Among them resided about two hundred thousand colonists, proud of their Saxon blood and of their Protestant faith.*

The great preponderance of numbers on one side was more than compensated by a great superiority of intelligence, vigor, and organization on the other. The English settlers seem to have been, in knowledge, energy, and perseverance, rather above than below the average level of the population of the mother country. The aboriginal peasantry, on the contrary, were in an almost savage state. They never worked till they felt the sting of hunger. They were content with accommodation inferior to that which in happier countries was provided for domestic cattle. Already the potato, a root which can be

*Political Anatomy of Ireland, 1672.

cultivated with scarcely any art, industry, or capita., and which cannot be long stored, had become the food of the common people.* From a people so fed diligence and forethought were not to be expected. Even within a few miles of Dublin, the traveller, on a son the richest and most verdant in the world, saw with disgust the miserable burrows out of which squalid and half-naked barbarians stared wildly at him as he passed.†

The aboriginal aristocracy retained in no common measure the pride of birth, but had lost the influence which is derived from wealth and power. Their lands had been divided by Cromwell among his followers. A portion, indeed, of the vast territory which he had confiscated had, after the restoration of the House of Stuart, been given back to the ancient proprietors. But much the greater part was still held by English emigrants under the guarantee of an act of parliament. This act had been in force a quarter of a century; and under it mortgages, settlements, sales, and leases without number had been made. The old Irish gentry were scattered over the whole world. Descendants of Milesian chieftains swarmed in all the courts and camps of the Continent. The despoiled proprietors who still remained in their native land brooded gloomily over their losses, pined for the opulence and dignity of which they had been deprived, and cherished wild hopes of another revolution. A person of this class was described by his countrymen as a gentleman who would be rich if justice were done, as a gentleman who had a fine estate if he could only get it. He seldom betook himself to any peaceful calling. Trade, indeed, he thought a far more disgraceful resource than marauding. Sometimes he turned freebooter. Sometimes he contrived, in defiance of the law, to live by coshering, that is to say, by quartering himself on the old tenants of his family, who, wretched as was their own condition, could not refuse a portion of their pittance to one whom they still regarded as their rightful lord. The native gentleman who had been so fortunate as to keep or to regain some of his land too often lived like the petty prince of a savage tribe, and indemnified himself for the humiliations which the dominant race made him suffer

* Political Anatomy of Ireland, 1672; Irish Hudibras, 1689; John Dunton's Account of Ireland, 1699.

† Clarendon to Rochester, May 4, 1686.

Bishop Malony's Letter to Bishop Tyrrel, March 8, 1689.

§ Statute 10 & 11 Charles I. chap. 16; King's State of the Protestants of Ireland, chap. ii. sec. 8.

by governing his vassals despotically, by keeping a rude harem. and by maddening or stupefying himself daily with strong drink.* Politically he was insignificant. No statute, indeed, excluded 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. matter. I hate the clown as if he had come yesterday." 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.

66

No

It

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

*King, chap. ii. sec. 8. Miss Edgeworth's Ring Corny belongs to a later and much more civilized generation; but whoever has studied that admirable portrait can form some notion of what King Corny's great grandfather must have been.

King, chap. iii. sec. 2.

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

Irelas.

and Presbyterian were strongly bound together by their com mon 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.†

seen.

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 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 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 con

* "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.

sidered it as a sumptuous and ostentatious trophy of the vic tory 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.

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

*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, 168. "It certainly is," Clarendon adds, "a most true notion."