a body, with the Speaker, brought to the Lord Lieutenant. This Bill is judged by the Commons to be of the greatest consequence to the security of his Majesty's government, the public peace, and the Protestant interest of the kingdom; and we agree with the Commons in this opinion. We find that, notwithstanding the laws already made for the prevention thereof, unregistered Popish priests and regulars are now as numerous in this kingdom as at any time before or since the Revolution, and have reason to believe they are in a great measure supported by gratuities on occasion of such marriages as are made void by this Bill. We have also reason to believe that many of his Majesty's soldiers in the several regiments on this establishment are by such priests and regulars married to Popish wives, and by them tempted to desert, and very often enlist themselves in Irish regiments in the service of foreign princes. We are also of opinion that this Bill will in a great measure prevent the seducing of many others of his Majesty's subjects to the Popish religion, it being a matter of notoriety that many Protestant settlements in this kingdom, of the lowest sort of people, have degenerated into Popery, occasioned chiefly if not entirely by such clandestine marriages as this Bill is intended to prevent. We therefore recommend the same to your Grace, as a Bill of great importance and expectation.' The Lord Lieutenant in a separate letter recommended the Bill. He dwelt exclusively on the tendency of mixed marriages to produce converts to Popery, and his letter does not contain a single allusion to abductions.1 The measure

1 He says the Commons' allege, and I believe with truth, that the priests direct their people to marry Protestants, as experience shows that in these cases the whole family become Papists, and that the former Act

does not reach those who have not, or are not heirs to, a certain estate, and the grievance intended to be remedied is among the common people.' - The Duke of Devonshire to the Duke of Newcastle, Dec. 25, 1743, English Re

of 1745, which at last became law, does, it is true, contain one clause rendering the condemnation of those who were guilty of abduction more easy, but the main body of the Act is substantially merely a reproduction of the Bill of 1743. It is directed mainly against mixed marriages and clandestine marriages. Its preamble simply states that 'the laws now in being to prevent Popish priests from celebrating marriages between Protestant and Protestant, or between Protestant and Papist, have been found wholly ineffectual,' and it was recommended by the Irish Council on precisely the same grounds as the Bill of 1743. By this law all marriages between Protestants and Catholics or between two Protestants, celebrated either by a priest or a degraded clergyman, were pronounced null and void. By another law it was provided that, although these marriages carried with them no civil consequences, those who celebrated them were still liable to the punishment of death.2

cord Office. Although there is not a single word about abductions either in the letter of the Duke of Devonshire or in the Bill of 1743 which the Duke of Devonshire was recommending, Mr. Froude has quoted (English in Ireland, i. 418) the first part of this passage as if it applied exclusively to that crime-to the exploits of those 'young gentlemen of the Catholic persuasion who were in the habit of recovering equivalents for the lands of which they considered themselves to have been robbed, and of recovering souls at the same time to Holy Church, by carrying off young Protestant girls,' &c. The words in italics he has not quoted.

19 George II. c. 13.

2 23 Geo. II. c. 10. The motives which produced mixed marriages were creditable, or at least not discreditable, to the Irish people, while the abductions were atrocious crimes. It therefore suits the purpose of Mr. Froude's book to exaggerate the latter to the utmost, and to represent the legislation annulling mixed marriages celebrated by priests as if it were entirely or almost entirely due to them. This, Mr. Froude has done (English in Ireland, i. 418, 594, 595), and he has given his case an appearance of great plausibility by the following quotation (English in Ireland, i. 418): "We have reason to believe the priests are in a great measure supported by gratuities, on occasions of such marriages as are

This Act, invalidating for political reasons marriages which were ecclesiastically complete, is one of the many instances in which a principle has been first introduced into English legislation in Ireland, and has afterwards extended to the sister country. It preceded by several years the Regency Act, and the Marriage Act of Lord Hardwicke, which were the first English laws admitting this principle. In spite of the measures against clandestine marriages, they continued in Ireland. There were always cases of attachment in which the weaker partner would yield to the solicitation of the stronger, but only on condition of the performance of a ceremony which satisfied her religious scruples,

made void by this Bill."-Memorandum of the Irish Council on sending to England "the heads of a Bill to make more effectual an

Act to prevent the taking away and marrying children against the wishes of their parents and guardians."-MSS.Dublin Castle, 1745.' Most of Mr. Froude's readers have no doubt accepted this quotation as a conclusive proof that the Act of 1745 was directed mainly against abductions, and that in the opinion of the Irish Council the priests were to a great extent supported by gratuities received on the occasion of abductions. As a matter of fact, the true title of the Bill as it is set forth in the Memorandum which Mr. Froude professes to quote, is, 'An Act for annulling all marriages to be celebrated by any Popish priest or degraded clergyman between Protestant and Protestant, or between Protestant and Papist, and to amend and make more effectual an Act passed in this king

dom in the sixth year of the reign of her late Majesty Queen Anne, entitled, An Act for the more effectual preventing the taking away and marrying children against the wills of their parents and guardians.' Only a single clause of the Bill relates to abductions, and the grounds upon which the Council recommended the Bill (including the words cited by Mr. Froude) are copied word for word from the letter of the Council recommending the Bill of 1743, in which there was no allusion whatever to abductions. The whole passage in the letter of 1743, as far as the words 'such clandestine marriages as this Bill is intended to prevent,' was transcribed by the Council in the letof 1745. It is only after that passage that they add that a clause has been added in this Bill for the more effectual punishment of principals and accessories in abduction cases. Council Books, Irish State Paper Office.

though it was unrecognised by law. Marriages which were regarded as morally legitimate, but which in the eyes of the law were simple concubinage, existed side by side with more regular unions; and the confusion of properties and families and titles resulting from them has been shown in conspicuous instances even in our own day.

I regret that this portion of my narrative should have assumed so polemical a character. The less such an element enters into history the better, and I should certainly not have introduced it but for what appears, to me at least, to be a very unusual amount and malignity of misrepresentation. In writing the history of a people it is neither just nor reasonable to omit the record of its prevalent crimes; but it is one thing to relate these, it is quite another thing to select the criminals of a nation as the special representatives of its 'ideas.' A writer who adopted the 'Newgate Calendar' as the chief repertory of English ideas, or who, professing to paint the various aspects of English life, discharged his task chiefly by highly coloured and dramatic pictures of the worst instances of English crime, would hardly produce a picture satisfactory to a judicial reader. In Ireland, where part of the country was still in a condition of Highland barbarism, while another part was not far behind English civilisation; where a long train of singularly unhappy circumstances had disorganised the national life; where neither law nor property nor religion rested upon their natural basis, and where the tradition of former struggles was still living among the people, it was natural and indeed inevitable that there should be much violence, much corruption, many forms of outrage, a great distortion of moral judgments. It is peculiarly necessary that the history of such a nation should be written, if not with some generosity, at least with some candour, that a serious effort should be made to present

in their true proportions both the lights and the shades of the picture, to trace effects to their causes, to make due allowance for circumstances and for antecedents. When this is not done, or at least attempted, history may easily sink to the level of the worst type of party pamphlet. By selecting simply such facts as are useful for the purpose of blackening a national character; by omitting all palliating circumstances; by suppressing large classes of facts of a more creditable description, which might serve to lighten the picture; by keeping carefully out of sight the existence of corresponding evils in other countries; by painting crimes that were peculiar to the wildest districts and the most lawless class as if they were common to the whole country and to all classes; by employing the artifices of a dramatic writer to heighten, in long, detailed, and elaborate pictures, the effect of the crimes committed on one side, while those committed on the other are either wholly suppressed or are dismissed in a few vague, general, and colourless phrases; by associating even the best acts and characters on one side with a running comment of invidious insinuation, while the doubtful or criminal acts on the other side are manipulated with the dexterity of a practised advocate;-by these methods, and by such as these, it is possible, even without the introduction of positive misstatement, to carry the art of historical misrepresentation to a high degree of perfection.

My own object has been to represent as far as possible both the good and the evil of Irish life, and to explain in some degree its characteristic faults. Irish history is unfortunately, to a great extent, a study of morbid anatomy, and much of its interest lies in the evidence it furnishes of the moral effects of bad laws and of a vicious social condition. It will appear clear, I think, from the foregoing narrative, how largely the