he should refuse he was liable to a fine of 40s. or three months' imprisonment, on further refusal to a fine of £10 or six months' imprisonment, and in addition to find security for his appearance at quarter sessions. On a third refusal he was to be held guilty of præmunire. By another section no Papist trader was allowed to take more than two apprentices, except in the favoured linen trade. THE CROWNING STATUTE OF THE PENAL CODE was an Act passed in the first year of George II., by which every Roman Catholic was absolutely disfranchised, and deprived of his vote both at Parliamentary and municipal elections.* Such was the substance of the penal code, as unjust as it was inefficacious. Appealing as it did to everything that was base in human nature, and proscribing all progress and improvement, no system could have been invented which would more certainly corrupt and demoralize the nation on whom it was brought to bear. If it did not achieve the results which its authors intended, it at any rate secured the ruin of the bulk of the old Irish gentry. 市 1 Geo. II., c. 9, s. 7. CHAPTER I. THE SHACKLING OF THE ENGLISH COLONY. DISFRANCHISED, disinherited, disabled from exercising the most ordinary civil functions, the Roman Catholics, the bulk of the Irish nation, endured all the social and moral disadvantages, all the contempt, all the bitter sense of injustice of a subject race. With no room for honourable ambition, no scope for enterprise, they were condemned to the swinish existence for which the evil of the day is sufficient, and which takes no thought for the morrow. They were so broken and crushed that neither in 1715, nor when George II.'s throne was more seriously threatened in 1745, did a single Irish Roman Catholic venture to raise a finger in the cause of the Pretender, though "Prince Charles's" army was crowded with Irish officers, who had followed him over from the Continent, no less than thirty-three surrendering at Inverness to the Duke of Cumberland. On the contrary, the Roman Catholics were rather looking to the Government for protection against the Protestant colony, and |