SECTION III.

LORD TRIMLESTON and the Dublin Committee insisted that the Catholics of Ireland had been loyal to the British Government. Had the fact been as they represented it, Catholic loyalty would have furnished an unanswerable proof of the wisdom of the penal laws. The inveterate turbulence of the Irish race would have at last yielded, and the rude assertion of authority and the demonstrated hopelessness of resistance would have broken a spirit which for six centuries had baffled any previous effort either to conciliate or subdue it. That the Catholic gentry who had retained part of their estates, and the leading Catholic clergy who understood the relative strength of the two countries, were unwilling to renew a struggle which, if unsuccessful, would entail fresh forfeitures and the execution of laws at present suspended, is doubtless perfectly true. That the other section of the Catholics, the heirs of the land which had been torn from their ancestors, and the dependants of the ruined families whose interests were the interests of their chiefs; that the poorer priests who identified their faith with their country, who looked to the unbroken spirit of the old race to reconquer for them the supremacy of their Church, that these were either disheartened or reconciled, that under any circumstances, short of full restoration and expiation, these men would cease to regard England and the English

connection with any feelings short of inveterate hatred, could be believed only by persons who were wilfully blind to the unchangeableness of the Irish disposition. Had the new owners of the soil resided on their estates, had they taught their unwilling tenants that the rule of England meant the rule of justice, had colonies of Scots and Englishmen been scattered over the land, had the Irish been able to learn by the contrast the material advantages of industry and energy, had they found in their conquerors beneficent masters who would have put down wrong doing and oppression of man by man, who would have erected schools for their children, who would have treated them as human beings and helped them to live in decency, they were not framed so differently from the common posterity of Adam but that in time their prejudices would have given way. But to four fifths of the Irish peasantry the change of masters meant only a grinding tyranny, and tyranny the more unbearable because inflicted by aliens in blood and creed. Under their own chiefs they had been miserable, but they were suffering at least at the hands of their natural sovereigns; and the clansman who bore his lord's name, and if harshly used by his own master, was protected by him against others, could not feel himself utterly without a friend. But the oppression of the peasantry in the last century was not even the oppression of a living man — it was the oppression of a system. The peasant of Tipperary was in the grasp of a dead hand. The will of a master whom he never saw was enforced against him by a law irresistible as destiny. The absentee landlords of Ireland had neither community of interest with the people nor sympathy of race. They had no fear of provoking

their resentment, for they lived beyond their reach. They had no desire for their welfare, for as individuals they were ignorant of their existence. They regarded their Irish estates as the sources of their income; their only desire was to extract the most out of them which the soil could be made to yield; and they cared no more for the souls and bodies of those who were in fact committed to their charge than the owners of a West Indian plantation for the herds of slaves whose backs were blistering in the cane fields.

Thus universally through the southern provinces there was settled and sullen discontent. The peasantry continued to regard the land as their own; and with the general faith that wrong cannot last forever, they waited for the time when they would once more have possession of it. "The lineal descendants of the old families," wrote Arthur Young, in 1774," are now to be found all over the kingdom, working as cottiers on the lands which were once their own. In such great revolutions of property the ruined proprietors have usually been extirpated or banished. In Ireland the case was otherwise, and it is a fact that in most parts of the kingdom the descendants of the old land-owners regularly transmit by testamentary deed the memorial of their right to those estates which once belonged to their families.” 1 Acts of savage ferocity which burst out from time to time showed that the volcanic fires were unextinguished, and might at any moment break out once more; and all along there was a secret connection between local agrarian passion and political disaffection. The Irish brigade served as an escape valve

1 Tour in Ireland, vol. ii. p. 133.

for the fiercer enthusiasts. The clergy had been directed from Rome to support the claims of the Pretender, and the Pretender's cause was never popular with the indigenous Irish. They had not forgiven the Act of Settlement or the cowardice which had betrayed them on the Boyne. They were ready, however, if a chance offered itself, and if there was no better outlook, to take arms in his favor; and although Lord Trimleston might have said truly that the Catholic gentry had ceased to take an interest in the Stuart cause, he was deceiving himself or deceiving the Viceroy when he undertook to speak for the Catholics as a whole. Coincidently with the intended invasion and the appearance on the coast of M. Thurot, began the celebrated Whiteboy disturbances in Tipperary. Many causes had combined at that moment to exasperate the normal irritation of the southern peasantry. With the growth of what was called civilization, absenteeism, the worst disorder of the country, had increased. In Charles the Second's time the absentees were few or none. But the better Irish gentlemen were educated, and the more they knew of the rest of the world, the less agreeable they found Ireland and Irish manners; while the more they separated themselves from their estates, the more they increased their rents to support the cost of living elsewhere. The rise in prices, the demand for salt beef and salt butter for exportation and for the fleets,1 were revolutionizing the agriculture of Munster. The great limestone pastures of Limerick and Tipperary, the fertile meadow land universally, was falling into the hands of capi

1 The war gave an enormous stimulus to the salt beef trade. Not only were the English fleets supplied from Cork, but the French and Spanish as well.

talist graziers, in whose favor the landlords, or the landlords' agents, were evicting the smaller tenants.1 They had the aims of English men of business without the redeeming features of the English character. Their object was to make money, and they cared not at what cost to the people that object was attained; while they combined with their unscrupulousness the worst vices of the worst class of the lower Irish gentry, and were slovenly, extravagant, and dissipated.2 To the peasantry these men were a curse. Common lands, where their own cows had been fed, were inclosed and taken from them. The change from tillage to grazing destroyed their employment. Their sole subsistence was from their potato gardens, the rents of which were heavily raised, while, by a curious mockery of justice, the grass lands were exempt from tithe, and the burden of maintaining the rectors and vicars of the Established Church was cast exclusively on the Catholic poor.

Among a people who are suffering under a common wrong there is a sympathy of resentment which links them together without visible or discoverable bond. In the spring of 1760 Tipperary was suddenly overrun by bands of midnight marauders. Who they were was a mystery. Rumors reached England of insurgent regiments drilling in the moonlight; of French officers observed passing and repassing the

1 In Limerick, Tipperary, Clare, Meath, and Waterford there are to be found the greatest graziers and cowkeepers, perhaps, in the world; some who rent and occupy from 3,000l. to 10,000l. a year. - Arthur Young, vol. ii. p. 102.

2 These graziers are too apt to attend to their claret as much as to their bullocks; they live expensively; and being enabled from the nature of their business to pass nine tenths of the year without any exertion of industry, contract such a habit of ease that works of improvement would be mortifying to their sloth. - Ibid.