DEMOCRACY AND LIBERTY

CHAPTER VI (continued)

THERE is one other subject connected with religious liberty that is likely to occupy a large share in the attention of the democracies of the future. It is the position and the aggressive policy of the Catholic Church. Of all the judgments of the great thinkers of the eighteenth century, none have been more signally falsified than those which they formed of the future of the Catholic Church. With scarcely an exception, they believed that its sacerdotal, superstitious, intolerant, and ultramontane elements were silently fading away; that it was taking more and more the character of a purely moralising influence; and that all danger of antagonism between it and the civil power had passed for ever. The delusion lasted for several years after the French Revolution, and it may be very clearly traced in the speeches and writings of the chief advocates of Catholic Emancipation. Many of them lived to acknowledge their mistake. There is a characteristically cynical saying attributed to Lord Melbourne, that on that question all the d-d fools in England predicted one set of things, and all the sensible men in England another set, and that the d—d fools proved perfectly right, and the sensible men perfectly wrong."

VOL. II.

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I have been told on excellent authority, that Macaulay once expressed in more decorous language a very similar view. 'I do not mean to take the white sheet,' he is reported to have said, for I acted honestly and conscientiously, but I now see that all we did for the Catholics has turned out badly.' The belief that Protestant and Catholic would become almost indistinguishable in the field of politics, and that the association of disaffection with Catholicism was purely casual and ephemeral, has proved ludicrously false, and in Ireland, as on the Continent, the question of priestly influence in politics is one of the most pressing of our time.

Looking back with the cheap wisdom which is supplied by the event, it is not difficult to trace the causes of this disappointment. In the comparatively narrow sphere of the United Kingdom, much is to be attributed to a strangely unbroken series of legislative blunders. Strong arguments have been urged in support of the opinion that some legislation resembling the Irish Penal Code against the Catholics was inevitable after the great social and political convulsions of the Revolution; but two parts of these laws had an evil influence of the most profound and enduring kind. The laws forbidding Catholics to purchase or inherit land, or to acquire lasting and profitable land-tenures, had the effect of producing in Ireland the most dangerous of class divisions; while the laws preventing or restricting Catholic education reduced the Catholic population to a far lower level of civilisation than their Protestant countrymen. When, at last, the hour of emancipation struck, the difficult task was most unskilfully accomplished. By the Irish Act of 1793 the vast ignorant Catholic democracy were granted votes for which they were utterly unfit, while the intelligent and loyal Ca

tholic gentry were still excluded from Parliament, and thus prevented from exercising over their poorer coreligionists the guiding and restraining influence which was pre-eminently wanting.

The education of the priests was equally mismanaged. There was a moment when it would have been quite possible to connect a seminary for the special education of priests with Dublin University, and thus to secure for the teachers of the Irish people a high level of secular education, and close and friendly connection with their Protestant contemporaries. If this course had been adopted, and if it had been combined with a State payment of the priests, the whole complexion of later Irish history might have been changed. But the opportunity was neglected. The priests were left wholly dependent on the dues of their people, and they were educated, apart from all the great secular influences of their time, in a separate seminary, which soon became a hotbed of disloyalty and of obscurantism. Then followed the shameful frustration of Catholic hopes at the time of Lord Fitzwilliam, and of the Union, which left a deep stain upon the good faith of the Government, and added immensely to Catholic disloyalty. Nothing, in the light of history, can be more clear than that it was of vital importance that the Legislative Union should have been accompanied by the three great measures of Catholic Emancipation, the commutation of tithes, and the payment of the priests; but all these measures were suffered to fail. The Catholics remained outside Parliament till a great agitation had brought the country to the verge of civil war. tithe system, which, more than any other single influence, tended to disorganise and demoralise Irish country life, was suffered to continue unchanged for thirtyeight years after the Union, and State payment of the

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priests, which nearly all the best judges had pronounced essential to the tranquillity of Ireland, was never accomplished.

It was a strange story, and it seems all the more strange if we compare it with the corresponding measures about the English Catholics. The concession of the suffrage to the vast ignorant majority of Irish Catholics was a measure of great danger, and it was accomplished in 1793; but the English Catholics, who could be no possible danger to the State, were excluded from the franchise till 1829. The Irish Catholics were admitted, before the close of the eighteenth century, to the magistracy, to degrees in Trinity College, to membership of lay corporations, and to every rank in the army except that of general of the staff. In England, for many years after this concession, they could neither be magistrates, nor members of corporations, nor enter the universities, nor legally hold any rank in the army. In Canada, on the other hand, all offices were open to them.1

The ill-fate that hung over British legislation about the Catholics still continued. The permanent insanity of George III. in 1812 removed what at the time of the Union had been deemed the one insuperable obstacle to their emancipation, and the Catholics were then perfectly ready to accept a State endowment for the priesthood, and, at the same time, to concede to the Government a right of veto on the appointment of their bishops. But the ascendency of the Tory party and the ability of Peel succeeded in again deferring the settlement of the question, and, in consequence of the postponement, a new agitation arose under O'Connell, which enormously increased its difficulties. O'Connell

1 May's Const. Hist. ii. 366.

induced the Irish priesthood to repudiate the securities' which they had previously accepted, and which Grattan and most of the other leading advocates of Catholic Emancipation had considered essential to its safe enactment. He gave the agitation an entirely democratic character, dissociating it from the property of the country, and placing the priesthood at its head. The creation of the Catholic Association in 1823 marked the triumph of his influence, and the election of 1826 showed clearly the instrumentality by which it was worked.

The Chief Secretary, Goulburn, described this election in some striking letters to Peel. Never,' he wrote, were Roman Catholic and Protestant so decidedly opposed. Never did the former act with so general a concert, or place themselves so completely under the command of the priesthood; and never did the priests assume to themselves such authority, and exercise their power so openly in a manner the most extraordinary and alarming.' The priests exercise on all matters a dominion perfectly uncontrolled and uncontrollable. In many parts of the country their sermons are purely political, and the altars in the several chapels are the rostra from which they declaim on the subject of Roman Catholic grievances, exhort to the collection of rent, or denounce their Protestant neighbours in a mode perfectly intelligible and effective, but not within the grasp of the law. In several towns no Roman Catholic will now deal with a Protestant shopkeeper in consequence of the priest's interdiction, and this species of interference, stirring up enmity on one hand and feelings of resentment on the other, is mainly

1I.e. the Catholic rent paid to O'Connell and his Association for carrying on the agitation.