V. BOOK design or accident, the draftsman had added a condition which made the bill into an absurdity, and relieved the government of the necessity of bestowing the most transient consideration on the subject. The heads of the Septennial Act were submitted as usual to the English law officers of the Crown. They returned it to the Lords of the Council with the following report : 'We have examined the Act for limiting the duration of Parliament transmitted from Ireland. So much thereof as limits the duration to a term of seven years, imports a most essential alteration in the constitution of Ireland. The fitness or unfitness of this provision is a matter of State of so high a nature that we submit the same entirely to the wisdom of your lordships. 'For the qualification of members we doubt how far such provisions are expedient for Ireland whether the qualification be not too high, and the exceptions too few. 'An amendment, however, is absolutely necessary. No member is to sit, according to the Act, till his qualification is proved, while a full House is sitting, with the Speaker in the chair. The law, therefore, can never be executed, nor any business at all, because no Speaker can be chosen before the members. have a right to vote; and no member can exercise his right of voting till such Speaker is chosen.'1 SECTION II. THE penal laws had failed to coerce the Catholics into conformity. The Charter schools had failed to convert them. The penal laws had failed because the English Government had interposed to protect the Catholic clergy. The Charter schools had failed, having been choked in Irish society, as wholesome vegetables are choked in a garden when the weeds are allowed scope to spring.1 Celtic Ireland was reviving from the stupor into which she had been thrown by the Revolution. Exclusion from the land had driven the more energetic of the Catholics into trade. Protestants who had to seek their fortunes had gone to countries where they were more fairly dealt with, and had left the field open. A commercial Catholic population, ambitious and wealthy, was springing up in Dublin, Limerick, and Cork; and a time was visibly approaching when their relations to the soil would have to be reconsidered. Liberal English politicians were already looking to the Catholics as a convenient counterpoise to the Protestant colonists, whom ill 1 Within a few years of their establishment the Charter schools had ceased to grow. Private benefactions fell off; and though Parliament made no difficulty in voting money, the annual grants were swallowed up by peculation. The industrial training, so excellent in conception, degenerated by negligence into a system in which the children became the slaves of the masters, and grew up in rags and starvation. As the numbers fell off, infant nurseries were esta- CHAP. I. BOOK V. usage was exasperating into disaffection. A section of the Catholics, in return-the educated men of business, the more temperate of the bishops, the noblemen of Norman-English blood, the Fingals, the Kenmares, the Trimlestons, who had preserved their estates and were allowed their titles by courtesy-were willing enough to meet advances to them with cordiality and gratitude. By the side of these, within the same communion, were the irreconcilable spirits who inherited the past traditions—the representatives of the dispossessed chiefs who nursed in secret their unappeased resentment, and revenged their wrongs when opportunity offered, as ravishers of women, cattle-houghers, incendiaries, and agrarian assassins. To them England was the cause of all the woes which they suffered, and was and should be to the end a loathed and execrated enemy. They were themselves the descendants of the men who had fought at Aghrim, and been cheated at Limerick. In the French brigade they had still an army on the Continent, which they recruited annually from their own ranks, and to which they looked as their future avenger. The first section accepted their situation, and made the best of it. The second brooded over their wrongs, and fed themselves with dreams of vengeance. Both, perhaps, were at bottom of the same nature, and were working towards the same end; but their outward attitude was markedly different. The English Government, accepting the distinction as real, made it the basis of its Irish policy, and the rule of the Castle statesmanship was to conciliate the more reputable Catholics, and to assume that the Catholic creed, as such, no longer forbade or interfered with alle I. giance to a Protestant sovereign. The first open sign CHAP. of the approaching change was in the viceroyalty of the Duke of Bedford, who, while in office in 1757, spoke in terms so unambiguous of a relaxation of the penal laws, that public thanks were bestowed on him from the altars of the Catholic chapels. It might have been well to relax the penal laws had the causes for which they were imposed been clearly asserted and admitted. Unhappily the desire of conciliation was pressed so far as to disfigure and conceal the facts of history. An annual sermon, preached before the House of Commons on the 23rd of October, was designed to keep alive the memory of the rebellion and massacres of 1641. Dr. Curry, a Catholic physician of eminence, ventured boldly on the same ground. In a memoir of the period he revived the plea which was alleged to Charles the Second in bar of the Act of Settlement, that the rebellion was no rebellion, but the innocent and cruelly misrepresented effort of a loyal people to defend the Crown against Puritan usurpation; that half of the alleged cruelties were the invention of fanatical bigots; that the rest were enormously exaggerated; and that so far as blood had been shed at all, it was only in self-defence against a deliberate design to exterminate the Catholic population. Dr. Curry's story will not bear examination, but it was well contrived to fall in with the growing senti ment that the past had better be forgotten; and thus a legend was allowed to re-establish itself unreproved, which teaches the Irish Catholics to regard themselves as victims of an atrocious conspiracy-a conspiracy to rob them of their lands, and to justify it by blackening their reputation. BOOK V. Bedford proposed to repeal the bill against the clergy, and to allow an adequate supply of priests, ordained abroad, to be systematically introduced and registered. The Catholics declined an offer which, in legalising the presence of their clergy, would have deprived them of their bishops; but they were too shrewd to refuse to recognise the good intentions of the Government, and they made haste to display in other ways their willingness to meet them. The splendid triumphs of Chatham's foreign policy-the conquest of India, the expulsion of the French from the Canadas, and the victories of the English everywhere, as unexpected as they were brilliant, provoked Louis XV. to aim a blow in return at England's vulnerable side. The officers of the Irish brigade held out the usual hope that an invasion of Munster would be followed by a rising of the people. The intention becoming known, the Dublin Catholics came forward with a demonstration of loyalty. Under Dr. Curry's guidance a declaration of allegiance, signed by three hundred Catholic merchants, was presented to the Viceroy, received graciously, and published in the 'Gazette.' The supineness of the Protestants played into their hands. The French |