A Letter to Pope Leo XIII. 393 general, Ginckle, on the terms known as the Treaty of Limerick. By that treaty William undertook that the Catholics should enjoy the free and unmolested exercise of their religion; that all the inhabitants of the counties of Limerick, Cork, Clare, Kerry, and Mayo who had fought for King James should possess their estates and practise their callings and professions undisturbed. The only oath they were required to take was the oath of allegiance to William and Mary. Acts were Not one article of that treaty was observed. passed to violate every one of its articles; to reduce the Catholics who still retained land to the alternative of surrendering their terrritorial rights or renouncing their faith; and to disqualify all Catholics from practising their callings and professions. The Irish Parliament of the period was largely composed of Protestants who held confiscated estates. William had confiscated one million and sixty thousand acres, and the holders of those and of previous forfeitures conceived that their best security against any possible resumption was to crush the Catholics to the dust. The atrocious laws that effected this purpose constitute what is called the Penal Code. But while those laws continued to operate, the English Government was incessantly employed in active efforts, legislative and administrative, to paralyse every Irish interest, commercial, manufacturing, agricultural, and even pastoral. This persistent and powerful hostility was destructive to the interests of the Irish Protestants, and as years went on the imperative necessity of self-defence against English aggression produced in the Protestant mind a sentiment of Irish nationality. The mere fact of legislating at home also necessarily generated an attachment to their own country, and it is most worthy of especial note that in proportion as national principles advanced among the Protestants, in the same proportion did their sectarian animosity to Catholics decline. In December, 1775, Henry Grattan entered the Irish Parliament. A Protestant himself, he worked through his long and glorious life to remove the restrictions under which his Catholic countrymen laboured. He spurned the insolent claim of the English Parliament to usurp legislative power over Ireland. Under his influence and that of his colleagues one after another of the penal shackles was removed from the Catholics in 1778, 1779, 1782, and 1793; and there cannot be a doubt that if the Irish Parliament had continued to exist it would in a very few years have restored the Catholics to full political equality. Influenced by Grattan, it had asserted its legislative independence in 1782; and England, by the voices of her King, Lords, and Commons, had pledged herself to respect that independence for all future time. The Protestant feeling towards Catholics had in general lost much of its ancient acerbity, and all things seemed tending to the final extinction of old feuds, and the amalgamation of Irishmen of all creeds in one great national fraternity. But Ireland would in that case have become strong and prosperous; and in order to keep her weak and powerless, Pitt, the potent English Minister, resolved to check the growing fusion of her inhabitants, to revive the internecine hatreds that were gradually passing away, and to inflame those hatreds to a pitch of sanguinary fury. To effect this purpose his agents in Ireland commenced a persecution of the people which may be truly described as diabolical. The persecution accomplished the purpose of its authors: the people were driven to rebel in 1798, and the outrages on both sides which necessarily accompanied such an outbreak effectually realised the design of the Government in renewing the rancorous hatreds of classes, and in affording a pretext for covering Ireland with a large army of occupation. Under terror of that army in the country, and by the employment of enormous bribery in Parliament, the Union-rejected in 1799-was in 1800 forced on the prostrate and unfortunate country. was a crime of the blackest turpitude. To achieve it cost some millions of money, and the sacrifice of many thousand lives. It Such, holy Father, were the hideous methods by which the Irish Parliament was destroyed, and by which the English Parliament obtained legislative power over Ireland. Pitt had pretended that the Union should be followed by Catholic Emancipation, but he subsequently told King George III. that he never would obtrude the Catholic question on his Majesty's notice. Twenty-nine years later the measure was conceded; but the concession would not then have been made if O'Connell had not convinced the Government that the alternative was civil war. Eighty-seven years have passed since the Irish Parliament was destroyed by the means I have described. The long interval presents a sad record of turbulence generated by A Letter to Pope Leo XIII. 395 popular misery; enormous abstraction of Irish revenue, public and private, by dishonest taxation and by absenteeism; decay of Irish manufacturing interests; periodical famines; our population diminished by more than three millions, partly by deaths from famine, partly by the emigration of our people from their country, which the Union had stripped of the means of supporting them. I do not know the exact proportion of Protestant and Catholic emigrants at present; but I know that in the decade ending in 1870 thirty-six Catholics had emigrated for one Episcopalian Protestant, and nineteen Catholics for one Presbyterian. To get rid of the Irish race has been the traditionary policy of English Governments for centuries. In ruder ages the object was effected by massacre ; in our more civilised period it is effected by a process that goes far to render Ireland uninhabitable. Home Rule, which we have persistently sought since the date of the Union, simply means that the Irish nation should retain the control of their own special concerns. It means the retention in Ireland of the gifts, material and intellectual, which God has bestowed on our country, and the development of those gifts for the benefit of the Irish people. The Union, on the contrary, means that the products of Ireland, material and intellectual, should be utilised, not for her own benefit, but for the benefit of England. Whatever we have lost there is one possession which the mass of our nation have retained-fidelity to the Catholic Church, of which your Holiness is the visible head. With the mass of our nation the sentiments of Irish nationality and of Catholic fidelity are so thoroughly interwoven that any attempt to sever them would be a most dangerous experiment. It is our earnest desire that the necessary ecclesiastical intercourse between your Holiness and the Irish Catholics, clerical and lay, should be direct and intimate, and undisturbed by the intervention, direct or indirect, of the English Government. With the dark record of that Government and of its policy to Ireland, there could be no surer way to deprive the Irish hierarchy of the confidence of the Irish Catholics than to allow the English Ministry any voice or influence in Irish ecclesiastical appointments. And it needs not be said that religion would sustain a heavy blow from such a deadly severance of our bishops and their flocks. In all I have now written there is not one word inconsistent with our loyalty to Queen Victoria. We object to the rule in Ireland of the London Parliament, knowing the infamous means by which that rule was acquired and the horrible consequences which for eighty-seven years it has produced. We are loyal to Her Majesty, not as Queen of England but as Queen of Ireland, and we loyally desire that Queen Victoria should govern her Irish subjects through an Irish Ministry and an Irish Parliament. To this I will only add that the Irish Catholics heartily, fervently, disclaim all desire for political ascendency in our restored Constitution; being firmly convinced that the peace, prosperity, and stability of the Irish State can best be promoted by the perfect political equality of all classes of religionists. In conclusion, permit me, most Holy Father, in this year of your Jubilee, to lay at your feet the homage of my congratulations and filial devotion. I implore your Holiness's apostolic benediction upon my declining years, as also upon all the individuals of my family and household. I pray the Almighty to prosper and protect your Holiness; and I pray Him also to preserve the Irish Church from the fatal taint of English Governmental interference. I beg to subscribe myself of your Holiness the deeply respectful and devoted servant, Kilcascan, Co. Cork, 17th June, 1887. W. J. O'N. Daunt. THE END. BAGENAL OF DUNLECKNY-his social habits In the Home Rule Conference ... ... ... 125, 126, 129 ... 1, 2, 3 93 ... ... 94, 95 96 ... ... 97 102-114 121 124 ... CASTLEREAGH-tries in vain to bribe Carew His financial "sketch" ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ...116, 228 2 ... . 54, 56, 61, 120 ... 3, 4 15 Catholic Emancipation promised to follow the Union ... ... ... ... ... Clontarf―projected meeting at, prevented by the Govern- Conference on Home Rule Carrick-on-Suir-its historical castle Cabins of labouring families described ... ... ... ...213, 214 |