path of religion, and how But there is a stubborn

time, become extinct. He would recollect how often selfinterest gently leads aside from the lew are the prejudices that resist it. ness in the public mind, to which the habits of individuals, in their intercourse with each other, bear no analogy. A religious creed never yet was put down by force. The gibbet, the boot, and the bayonet could not do it in Scotland; but England must have another lesson; and she found that insult, coercion, and pillage, could not do it in Ireland. "I have conversed," says a traveller in Ireland, of the period, "on the subject, with some of the most distinguished characters in the kingdom; and I cannot, after all, but declare that the scope, purport, and aim of the laws of discovery, as executed, are not against the Catholic religion, which increases under them, but against the industry and property of whoever professes that religion. In vain has it been said, that consequence and power follow property, and that the attack is made in order to wound the doctrine through its property. If such was the intention, I reply, that seventy years' experience proves the folly and futility of it. Those laws have crushed all the industry and wrested most of the property from the Catholics; but the religion triumphs; it is thought to increase. Those who handed about calculations to prove a decrease, admit, on the face of them, that it will require FOUR THOUSAND YEARS to make converts of the whole, supposing that work to go on in future as it has in the past time!"

The natural process by which the Roman Catholics still retained the means of existence, and even, in many instances, secured wealth, is curious, and teaches a valuable lesson to un Just legislators. The Protestant had, at first, the satisfaction of seeing his exertions successful. The Roman Catholic farmer and merchant sunk into the dust before him, and the field was laid open to himself. The estates of the Roman Catholic gentry crumbled gradually under the pressure of the penal laws, and had all the appearance of coming, by degrees, into the hands of the Protestants. But in what was he profited by possessing a portion of the bare earth in a land of beggars? If

he possessed a landed estate, which he was anxious to dispose of, was it an advantage to him that his neighbour, a Roman Catholic, dare not buy it? If he wanted to improve his property by long leases, was it any comfort to find that only a very small number of the inhabitants could take such leases? If he wanted to secure money on property, and found a Roman Catholic landed proprietor ready to borrow it, was it gratifying to his pride to discover that the heir, by turning Protestant, might render the security void? In short, in the intercourse between man and man, did the Protestant find his affluence increased by his neighbour being unfitted to make bargains with him? No. Therefore, the Protestant individual, practically exposing the folly of the Protestant legislature, was obliged sometimes to join in evading the laws, for his own interest. He must have some one to buy from and sell to, or he must starve. His transactions with the Roman Catholic were done at great risk, and therefore were not so profitable, as if both had been free; but there was an imperious necessity, and all must be encountered. The nation thus became full of secret contracts a sort of nation of smugglers. The Protestants still, in a body, thought the penal laws necessary; but they were compelled individually to evade them, for their own sakes. The Protestants, at first, believed that, as they had prevented wealth from flowing in the direction of the Catholics, it would come all their own way; but they found themselves mistaken. Before wealth came to them, it must exist, and it could only come into existence by the industry and commerce of the population. Had they continued to keep four-fifths of the population beyond the pale of the laws, barely existing, and without the means or the inducement to better their condition, the Protestants would have found that there would soon be very little property in the country, either for themselves or other people. The goverment, too, was obliged to see the same truth in detail, though it could not see it in a general view. The penal laws were not put in constant operation. They were suspended over the heads of the victims, in terror, or were used on particular occasions. Indeed they constituted

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too heavy a weapon to be kept continually in motion by any government. The British government could not afford to keep so vast a system of oppression in active operation. Moreover if Catholic property had been entirely suppressed, the revenue from Ireland would have been small. But the cruel ingenuity which devised these laws, made most of them self-acting. They enabled the Irish to prey upon each other without the interference of the government. Still the father was subject to the perfidy of his son, the property of the Papist was unsafe, the priest depended on the honesty and good feelings of his neighbours or the mercy of the Protestant Justice, and marriage could not be contracted with the certainty of its being perma

nent.

Having now acomplished a dreary and revolting detail, a more pleasing prospect opens on our view, in the endeavours of those bold and upright men, whose great efforts gradually relieved their country of portions of this heavy load. The Roman Catholics, when they had acquired courage meekly to tell their grievances, thus described their state:

"We are deeply sensible of your majesty's clemency, in moderating the rigorous execution of some of the laws against us, but we humbly beg leave to represent that several, and those the most severe and distressing of these laws, execute themselves with the most fatal certainty, and that your majesty's clemency cannot, in the smallest degree, interpose for their mitigation; otherwise, your Roman Catholic subjects would most cheerfully acquiesce in that resource, and rest with an absolute and unbounded assurance on your majesty's princely generosity, and your pious regard to the rights of private conscience.

“We are, may it please your majesty, a numerous and very industrious part of your majesty's subjects; and yet, by no industry, by no honest endeavours on our part, is it in our power to acquire, or to hold, almost any secure or permanent property whatsoever. We are not only disqualified to purchase, but are disabled from occupying any land, even in farm, except

on a tenure extremely scanted, both in profit and in time; and if we should venture to expend anything on the melioration of land thus held, by building, by enclosure, by draining, or by any other species of improvement so very necessary in this country, so far would our services be from bettering our fortunes, that these are precisely the very circumstances which, as the law now stands, must necessarily disqualify us from continuing those farms, for any time, in our possession.

"Whilst the endeavours of our industry are thus discouraged, (no less, we humbly apprehend, to the detriment of the national prosperity, and the diminution of your majesty's revenue, than to our particular ruin,) there are a set of men, who, instead of occupying any honest situation in the commonwealth make it their employment to pry into our miserable property to drag us into the courts, and to compel us to confess on our oaths, and under the penalties of perjury, whether we have, in any instance, acquired a property in the smallest degree, exceeding what the rigour of the law has admitted; and, in such case, the informers, without any other merit than that of their discovery, are invested-to the daily ruin of several innocent, industrious families-not only with the surplus in which the law is exceeded, but in the whole body of the estate and interest. so discovered; and it is our grief that this evil is likely to continue and increase, as informers have, in this country, almost worn off the infamy which, in all ages, and in all other countries, has attended their character, and have grown into some repute, by the frequency and success of their practices.

"And this, most gracious sovereign, though extremely grievous, is far from being the only or most oppressive particular in which our distress is connected with the breach of the rules of honour and morality. By the laws now in force in this kingdom, a son, however undutiful or profligate, shall, merely by the merit of conforming to the established religion, not only deprive the Roman Catholic father of that free and full possession of his estate, that power to mortgage or otherwise dispose of it, as the exigencies of his affairs may require, but shall

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himself have full liberty immediately to mortgage, or otherwise alienate the reversion of that estate from his family for ever—a regulation by which a father, contrary to the order of nature, is put under the power of his son, and through which an early dissoluteness is not only suffered, but encouraged, by giving a pernicious privilege, the frequent use of which has broken the hearts of many deserving parents, and entailed poverty and despair on some of the most ancient and opulent families in this kingdom.

"Even when the parent has the good fortune to escape this calamity in his life-time, yet he has, at his death, the melancholy and almost certain prospect of leaving neither peace nor fortune to his children; for, by that law which bestows the whole fortune on the first conformist, or, in non-conformity, disperses it among the children, incurable jealousies and animosities have arisen; a total extinction of principal and of natural benevolence has ensued; whilst we are obliged to consider our own offspring, and the brothers of our own blood, as our most dangerous enemies. The blessing of Providence on our families, in a numerous issue, is converted into the most certain means of their ruin and depravation. We are, most gracious sovereign, neither permitted to enjoy the few broken remains of patrimonial inheritance, nor, by our industry, to acquire any secure establishment to our families."-(Curry's Civil Wars of Ireland, ii. 287.)

This is a picture of the state of the Roman Catholic population in their better condition, when the laws against them were less strenuously enforced, because they were found to cut both ways. The tone of the remonstrance is not less sad than the matter. It shews how gently and subduedly the Roman Catholic lifted his head after his long subjection. It was given in the still small voice of supplication-a voice always drowned in the confusion of party and cabal, and which the British legislature never hears. The petitioners "earnestly besought his majesty that it might not be considered as an instance of presumption or discontent that they thus adventured to lay open to his majesty's mercy a very small part of their uncom