BOOK IV. 1729 was a crown officer. It could scarcely be pleaded that a decent administration of the gaol could be dangerous to English trade; and, in the absence of difficulties on the score of trade, the Castle authorities might have been reasonably expected to see that these places were decently managed. The House of Commons had the merit of dragging to light the The prisons were dens of infamy and extortion. The sheriff marshal, whose salary as keeper of Newgate was ten pounds a year, was found to make his place worth on an average nearly 1,2007. Newgate meant a dungeon, starvation, and irons. The sheriff marshal was allowed a separate gaol of his own called the Black Dog, the management of which he deputed to his sub-sheriff at 201. a year. At both prisons he made a trade of vending liquors.' Each prisoner consigned, though but for a night, to the Black Dog was taxed two shillings for a treat, and, if he refused, was beaten and stripped. The charge for a bed was a shilling a night. Each room was a mere closet; and in many of these closets were five beds. In each bed three, four, or five persons were set to sleep if the place was crowded, and two shillings were extorted from each. The sheriff marshal's wife collected the rents. When a prisoner's money was gone he was passed down into a dungeon, lighted from a common sewer, 12 feet square and 8 feet high, called the Nunnery, where the strolling women were lodged. The place so stunk from the sewers, that the House of Commons committee could only remain long enough to measure the dimensions. Fourteen and sometimes twenty women were placed there of a night. If they attempted to come out for air and light they were beaten back. Newgate, when the committee visited it, was found choking with prisoners. Wretched objects were lying naked on the ground, some dying, some dead of cold and hunger. Some had been four days without food of any kind. The committee enquired what allowance of bread was made to the crown prisoners, and found that the custom of allowing bread had been for some time discontinued. The stench among the naked starving felons was so intolerable that the committee fled after a stay of half a minute. Commons' Journals. October 15, 1729, vol. viii. Appen dix. II. 1732 deadly evidence of shameful and insolent neglect, CHAP. and, so far as lay in them, purged out and reformed the foul abuses which were found rampant there. Felons, after this, were regularly and rapidly transported, sold to planters in the colonies, and paid in their persons for the cost of sending them out. Other more ordinary work, too, was not forgotten. Roads were made, which were the admiration of Arthur Young; canals were cut; bogs were drained; a new Parliament house was built, with both thrift and skill, for a fourth of the sum for which the same building could be erected to-day.' New streets and squares sprung up in Dublin, which, if without beauty, show in their stability, within and without, that the art of doing good work had been learnt, and not as yet cast aside. Glimpses show themselves at times, in the transactions of Parliament, of high spiritual aims. As late as 1771, the Commons made an attack upon drunkenness, and passed heads of a bill to suspend the whiskey distilling which, as they said, was demoralizing the country. Lord Townshend, then Viceroy, informed the English ministry that the House had the bill exceedingly at heart,2 that it was generally popular, and would give content and satisfaction throughout the kingdom; and a measure which had no other object than to encourage sobriety would have actually passed into law had not England, in the capacity of guardian of human freedom, interfered. The dawning science of political economy had discovered that Governments are unconcerned with morality. Besides the interference with 1 The entire cost scarcely exceeded 34,000l. See the Commons' Journals. 2Lord Townshend to the Earl of Rochfort, March 27, 1771.' MSS. Record Office. VOL. I. Q Q BOOK IV. 1732 the natural liberty of the subject, it was found that, to pass the Bill, would involve a loss to the excise. One other creditable measure has to be mentioned, which was not extorted from England or English jealousy, but from the bigotry of the bench of Bishops of both countries. The learned prelates, who denied the validity of Presbyterian marriages, and prosecuted kirk elders for concubinage, were so impressed with the solemnity of a sacrament performed by a competently ordained priest, that a ceremony by which a Protestant girl had been tied by force to any villain who had carried her off and ravished her, they persisted in regarding as an indissoluble bond. Until all such unions were declared null and void, no effort to check the practice was of the least avail. At length, in 1732, the Irish Bishops were brought to yield, and the heads of a satisfactory bill were sent over for approbation to London.1 Objections were anticipated from their brethren in England;' and the expectation was too justly fulfilled. The bill was set aside, 'as of an extraordinary nature,'2 and the ravishing continued merrily without interruption. In 1735, after some outrage more flagrant than usual, there was a partial concession. When the sufferer was a lady of fortune, the English 1 'I believe you know it is a common practice in Ireland for a tall, strong Papist to hurry away a pretty girl with a good fortune into the mountains, and there commit acts of horror and violation, and that the poor undone maid is glad at any rate to be made an honest woman. This is readily performed by the holy men who are at hand to assist their lay friends on such occasions. These outrages, besides many other evils arising from forced and clandestine marriages, have engaged the bench of Irish Bishops to come into this law. How it will be relished by their brethren in England you will have an oppor tunity to observe.'-' W. Cary to Secretary Delafaye, January 2, 1732. MSS. Record Office. 2 List of Irish bills rejected, February, 1732.' Ibid. II. 1743 bench consented that, after a tedious and expensive CHAP. suit in the ecclesiastical courts, a marriage might be set aside. The distinction between rich and poor was felt to be odious. The House of Commons insisted, in 1743, that all such marriages should be, ipso facto, void. The Bishops resisted with the most determined obstinacy; they were willing to declare a separation by their own spiritual authority; they protested against 'disannulling a marriage.' The Commons declared that the principle had been conceded in the act already passed, and that farmers' daughters had as good a right to protection as heiresses.2 The Bishops shut their ears. The struggle was protracted for two years, and it was not till 1745, under the viceroyalty of Lord Chesterfield, that their preposterous and grotesque resistance could be at last overcome. In a bill then drawn by the Commons, every marriage performed by a Popish priest between Protestant and Protestant, or between Protestant and Papist, was unreservedly declared to be null. The heads which contained these sweeping clauses were carried in the Commons without a dissentient voice. They were presented to Chesterfield by the Speaker, attended by the entire House. The Speaker represented that, by these marriages, more than by any other cause, Protestant settlements were broken up, family ties dissolved, and the worst specimens of the Catholic clergy supported and encouraged. Chesterfield himself endorsed the opinions of the Lower House.3 SECTION IV. In the country as well as in Dublin there were Protestant gentlemen who, so far as their strength extended, were making amends for the imbecility of the Government. Those who have read Arthur Young's Tour in Ireland,' have accompanied him to the houses of great Peers and Commoners, where stately manners, high motives, and refined intelligence were as conspicuous as in the noblest families of England; where the privileges of a ruling class produced the virtues of a true aristocracy, in contrast to the vices which degraded the baser members of the same order. Gross as was the degeneracy of the majority, a chosen few were still spending their fortunes in improving agriculture, in reclaiming mountain and morass, in building schools and churches, conscious of the duties which they owed to the people, and earning their gratitude and affectionate devotion by the unselfish fidelity with which those duties. were discharged. Scattered thinly over the four provinces, the salt of the country, they continued, generation after generation, in brave and honourable execution of a work which brought its own reward with it: they sate enthroned in the imagination of the peasantry as their natural rulers; the Banshees wailed for them when they died; the 'good people' took them under their protection, as they in turn were the protectors of the poor. Out of these families have risen many of the most brilliant officers of the English army, the most illustrious ornaments of the |