Santiago (Spain), Macoa, Caizo (Naples), Orleans, Clermont, Ca- The Penal Laws were enforced with much rigour till the latter part of the 18th century. In 1773 the Anglo-Irish Parliament refused to pass a Bill making it legal for papists to lend money on land mortgage. In 1776 Lord Charlemont threw the House of Lords into a tumult when he brought in a bill to make it lawful for a Catholic to lease a cabin and a potato garden. He was dubbed "papist" and voted out of the chair for such infamous proposal. An uncle of Daniel O'Connell, Arthur O'Leary, was, near the century's end, shot by a soldier for refusing to sell his beautiful horse to a Protestant for five pounds. And O'Connell's father, Morgan, made his first purchase of land through the medium of a Protestant friend-in whose name the land had to be bought, and held. O'Connell's grandfather would not let Smith, when he was writing a history of Kerry, dilate upon the ancient greatness of the clan Conal. "There has been peace in these remote glens," he warned Smith. "Do not draw the attention of the authorities to us." In 1775 the English traveller, Twiss, was saddened to see crowds of boys learning writing on the roadside-saddened, because, to his well-trained English mind, it was "not judicious to teach the lower orders." In 1776 Arthur Young everywhere met with schools held aback of a hedge: "I might as well say 'ditch' for I have seen many a ditch full of scholars," he adds.22 21 There was then (as_now) an Irish College at Salamanca. Other Irish Colleges were at Lisbon, St. Omer, Louvain, Douai, Tournay, Antwerp, Lauzanne, etc. In the above report we find, under various parishes such items as, in one parish, "One popish priest who officiates in different parts of ye parish in open air,""One popish priest who officiates in ye open fields,"-"One popish priest who officiates in some open field, or some poor cabin," "Several itinerant popish priests and friars do at some times officiate in this parish.” 22 In 1796 the French traveller de Latocnaye tells of seeing the hedge schools. And at the River Shannon he saw Mass being celebrated among the ruins of an ancient abbey-and the priests, sitting upon tombstones in a cemetery, hearing Confession, holding little flags to shield the penitents at their knee. In the first quarter of the 19th century Cæsar Otway describes one of the outlawed schools which he saw (on Cape Clear Island). It was a low hut with no chimney, covered with a network of rope, and hung like a wasp's nest on the side of a cliff. He said he had to bend double in order to enter, as going through a cavern's mouth. Inside was a dark, smoky, smelly cave, where he could not at first discern anything. But when he was able to see he observed twenty children, sitting on stones, humming like hornets preparing to swarm. Every urchin, he said, had a scrap of paper or a leaf of a book in his hand. In Ireland in these trying times, just as in the more glorious days of Ireland's golden age more than a thousand years before, learning and learners were held in high reverence. And the poor people now (as then) vied with each other in offering share of the little they possessed to the young students who sojourned among them. The Poor Scholar was honoured and loved, and was entertained free of all charge, wherever he went and howsoever long he stayed. Doheny in his introduction to O'Mahony's Keating says, "As late as 1820 there were in many counties classical schools in which the English tongue was never heard." The languages were Irish, Latin and Greek. Furthermore, down to his own day (middle of the 19th century), "Literary hospitality continued unimpaired. The ablest masters, classical and scientific, have taught thousands of students who for years were entertained with the most lavish kindness in the houses of the farmers in the districts around the schools, of late a barn or deserted dwelling of mudwall or thatched roof. In Tipperary, Waterford, and Limerick it was usual to have two of these scholars living (free) for four and five consecutive years with a family, and treated with extreme courtesy and tenderness. In the first cycle of this century there was scarcely a farmer of any competency who did not give one son or all of his sons, a classical education, without any reference to intended professions or pursuits." The Volunteer movement in the 1780's first began to take the edge off Protestant prejudice-which had been so astonishingly narrow and bitter that Burke states in his letter to Langrishe, "There are thousands in Ireland who never conversed with a Roman Catholic in their whole life unless they happened to talk to their gardeners' workmen, or to ask their way when they had lost it in their sports." On all occasions, in conversation or in writing, and in all official documents, including the King's speeches and Acts of Parliament Catholicism was referred to as popery, and Catholics always named either papists or "persons professing the popish religion." In 1793 all good Protestants of both England and Ireland gasped to find the term Catholic employed in a speech from the Throne! Revolution was then in the air, and it was wisdom and statesmanship to begin to rub the papist with the fur. And in that year, of 1793, was passed an Act 23 relieving the Cath 23 In the debate on that Bill of 1793, it is good to find-standing out from among the Protestant bishops, who usually led in hatred of Catholicism-the highminded Protestant bishop of Killala. In his speech in the House of Lords he expressed sentiments that did credit to his Christian heart-"I look upon our Catholic Another olics of many of their disabilities-in theory at least. thirty-six years were to elapse before the next step was taken, under compulsion from the O'Connell agitation, and the Act known as Catholic Emancipation made law. Burke's Tract on the Popery Code. Burke's Letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe. brethren as fellow subjects and fellow Christians, believers in the same God, and partners in the same redemption. Speculative differences in some points of faith, with me are of no account: they and I have but one religion-the religion of Christianity. Therefore, as children of the same Father-as travellers on the same road-and seekers of the same salvation, why not love each other as brothers? It is no part of Protestantism to persecute Catholics; and without justice to the Catholics there can be no security of the Protestant establishment. As a friend, therefore, to the permanency of this establishment, to the prosperity of the country, and the justice due to my Catholic brethren, I shall cheerfully give my vote that the Bill be committed." The Christian character of the papist-hating English appointees who usually filled the chairs of the Irish Protestant bishoprics, may be guessed at from Dean Swift's description of them: "Excellent and moral man had been selected upon every occasion of a vacancy, but it unfortunately happened that as these worthy divines crossed Hounslow Heath, on their way to Ireland, they were set upon by highwaymen, who frequented the Common, robbed and murdered-who seized their robes and patents, came over to Ireland, and were consecrated bishops in their stead." 1 Every cause but our own. -EMILY LAWLESS, "With the Wild Geese." "THE bright as contrasted with the dark side of the national story," O'Callaghan calls his own record of the Irish Brigades in the Service of France. "Ormuzd abroad to compensate for Ahriman at home." Lecky, too, affirms that it is in the continental Catholic countries, where the Irish exiles and their children had risen to posts of the highest dignity and power, and not amid the "outcasts and pariahs" in the motherland, "the real history of Irish Catholics during the first half of the eighteenth century is to be found." Ireland herself has never taken this view of the question. Again and again she has caught "echoing down the wind. Blown backwards from the lips of Fame" the names of her exiled children: Marshals of France like Lord Clare, Prime Ministers of Spain like Don Ricardo Wall, creators of victorious armies like Count Peter Lacy in Russia, mighty war lords like Field Marshal Brown, in Austria; founders of empire like Count Lally in India, leaders of European diplomacy like Tyrconnell, O'Mahony, Lawless and de Lacy. So their titles, loudsounding, came to her, borne on the trumpet music of the world's applause. But Ireland had a name of her own for them. Ran 1 Ormuzd was in Persian mythology "the good principle" as opposed to Ahriman, "the bad." sacking all nature for its most desolate image to figure forth her thought of them, its most desolate cry to render the wailing music made in her ears by their last farewell, she called them na Geana Fiadhaine, "the Wild Geese." "She said: 'Not mine, not mine that fame They won it yonder, sword in hand.' Not hers in truth that fame. Hardly one of them-field-marshal, diplomat, prime minister, empire-builder, was able to do for her the slightest service, or even to win for her the sympathy (much less the active help) of the nations to which they had given their all in life and in death. To Ireland, and to those who look at history through her eyes, the story of the "Wild Geese" is a trag edy-stately and stirring, and noble if you will, in its grandiose setting and majestic movement-but almost unredeemed, and the essence of that tragedy is, like the poignant and vain regret for the life blood of Sarsfield spilled at Landen, "that this was not for Ireland." Only one service the "Wild Geese" did for their own country. Always the hope remained with her that one day they would return, and avenge her wrongs on her iniquitous oppressor. And that hope gave her courage to endure. Eighteenth century Irish poetry is buoyant with it: "The Wild Geese shall return, and we'll welcome them home So active, so armed, so flighty, A flock was ne'er known to this island to come Since the days of Prince Fionn the mighty. They will waste and destroy, Overturn and o'erthrow, They'll accomplish whate'er may in man be! Just heaven they will bring Devastation and woe On the hosts of the tyrannous Seaghan Buidhe." Surely, of all Ireland's sorrows, none was greater than seeing her boys go forth from her, year after year, to serve as cannonfodder for foreign princes-their departure as fixed a moment in the sorrowful calendar of her seasons, as the annual flight of the wild geese, when even the stubble had withered from her wintry fields. Mrs. Morgan John O'Connell gives us, in The Last Colonel of the Irish Brigade, a lively picture of such a departure from the coast of Kerry about the year 1761. The fleet little smuggling |