I. 1735 gion among the people. In the ancient English CHAP. spirit, the Bishop of Cloyne called on the Government to re-affirm its old authority, restrain the licentiousness of the gentry, compel them to educate themselves, and educate the poor under their charge. When the industry of the country was once more in healthy activity, the incorrigibly idle, the sturdy and valiant mendicant, the rogue that preferred to live on other men's earnings by theft or beggary, might then be lawfully enslaved by the state, and set to labour whether he would or no. The public had a right over those who could or would not find employment; and temporary servitude was the best cure for idleness. Vagrants might be made slaves for a term of years. The sight of them, chained in pairs and compelled to work, would be a wholesome lesson to the rest of the community; and the rogue himself, who was thus earning, however unwillingly, his own food and clothes and lodging, so far from being degraded, was lifted on the first step of the ladder by which he could rise to manhood.1 So wrote the gentle Berkeley in days when liberty and human right retained their original meanings; when slavery was still conceived to consist in bondage to evil habits, and it was not yet understood that the first privilege of a free man was to do wrong, if he happened to prefer it to doing right. But when a country is to be governed, there must first be found men to govern, and England could not govern Ireland, nor would she allow the Irish Protestants to govern it for her. And 1 Several Queries proposed to the Consideration of the Public, by George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne.' Works, vol. iii. p. 149, &c. The IV. 1735 BOOK indeed, handled as they had been, they were fast unfitting themselves for the office. The Puritan spirit of the seventeenth century settlers was dying out. The industrial spirit which should have taken its place had been forbidden to grow. A moiety of the landowners were lounging in England or abroad. Of those who remained, a select few of the highest in the land had formed themselves into a society of Blasters, men whose religious service was a liturgy of execrations, and whose aim in life was to invent untried forms of impiety and profligacy. The choice spirits set the tone. Those less gifted, either in fortune or genius, imitated, at a distance, the more splendid vices of their leaders. The better sort, weary of the hopeless struggle, dropped off one by one, as the century waned, from the narrow road to the broad; till the English policy completed its work, and the ruling race so painfully planted, to hold and civilize Ireland into a Protestant country, degenerated into the politicians of 1782, and the heroes of the memoirs of Sir Jonah Barrington. SECTION II. By the statute law of Ireland neither Papist nor Presbyterian was permitted to open or teach in any school or college in the four provinces. The Parliament had provided for the education of the Irish nation by an act requiring the clergy to provide schools in each separate parish; and in this condition the Government had been content to leave the matter, satisfied with having prescribed an impossibility. The Catholics, with the same steady courage and unremitting zeal with which they had maintained and multiplied the number of their priests, had established open schools in places like Killarney, where the law was a dead letter. In the more accessible counties, where open defiance was dangerous, they extemporised class teachers under ruined walls, or in the dry ditches by the roadside, where ragged urchins, in the midst of their poverty, learnt English and the elements of arithmetic, and even to read and construe Ovid and Virgil. With institutions which showed a vitality so singular and so spontaneous, repressive acts of Parliament contended in vain. A Government which undertook to coerce a Catholic country with penal statutes was bound in justice and prudence to provide a better substitute for the system which it proscribed. After waiting in vain for Popery to die of itself, intelligent Protestant gentlemen discovered, that if conversions were to make progress they must take some active measures with the education of the children, and provide schools which CHAP. BOOK IV. 1730 should offer greater temptations than those of their rivals. Wealth, power, superior enlightenment, all were in their favour. It was the boast of Protestantism that it was the religion of intelligence. The hold of the priests, Protestant writers were never weary of repeating, was on the ignorance and superstition of their flocks. Yet the priests were caring more for knowledge than they, beating them on their own ground, and fighting them with their own weapons, of which they were neglecting the use. Shamed and alarmed into exertion, the clergy and gentry took the matter into their own hands. From the beginning of the eighteenth century, and perhaps earlier, charity day schools had been scattered about by the exertions of individuals, where the children of the peasantry had been taught the catechism, and had received some kind of industrial training. In 1710 there were 30 of these schools, where 700 boys and girls, who would consent to be made Protestants, were being taught to read and write, to cultivate the ground, to grow hemp and flax, and spin, and knit, and sew. In 1719 an educational association had been formed: 130 of these day schools had been established, and the number of children receiving education was 3,000. In 1730, in the viceroyalty of Lord Carteret, and in connexion with the general effort described in the last section, to arrest the country in its downward progress, many peers, archbishops and bishops, the chancellor, the judges, and the justices of the peace, united in a joint representation of the necessity for larger exertion; and, without demanding the intervention of the state, professed themselves ready, if permitted, to establish a system of education which in time might become as extensive and as effectual as the admirable institutions which had been founded by CHAP. the Reformers in Scotland. The voluntary efforts hitherto had been confined chiefly, if not wholly, to Ulster. In the Southern provinces the colonies of Protestant peasants, which had been sown in so many parts by the Commonwealth leaders, had wasted away. Scanty handfuls only survived anywhere, unless under the protection of some resident powerful family. There was but one means left to recover the lost ground, 'That a sufficient number of English Protestant schools should be established where the children of the Irish nation might be instructed in the English tongue and in the principles of true religion.' 'The clergy,' it was said, 'had done their best, but they were powerless to cope with so great a difficulty.' 'To the intent, therefore, that the youth of Ireland might be brought up in the true faith and loyalty in all succeeding generations, the Crown was requested to grant a charter for a corporation which might be empowered to hold lands and receive donations and bequests for the supporting of such schools as might be erected in the most necessary places, where the children of the poor might be taught gratis.' Some subtle assault upon English interests, or the English purse, was usually assumed to lurk under Irish petitions. Too much education, if there were no other objection, might become an element of strength to the country, and to keep Ireland weak was the first principle of English policy. Walpole took three years to consider whether the gen 1 'Humble Petition of the Primate, the Chancellor, Archbishops, Noblemen, Bishops, Judges, Gentry, VOL. I. L L and Clergy of Ireland, May 7, 1730.' I. 1730 |