TREATY OF LIMERICK.

PENAL LAWS.

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though a little reflection might have shown that France could never be for Ireland anything but a broken reed. Even if the English, and the Celts and Irishmen of mixed blood adhering to English rule, could have been driven by the aid of France into the sea, the work would have to be begun over again; for England could not let France have Ireland as a base of operation, and France could not hold it. The violation of the Treaty of Limerick is an undying bląt, not on William, who would have adhered to it if he could, but on the Irish Protestants; even as the withholding Catholic emancipation at the time of the Union, is an undying blot on the character of George III. and on that of some of Pitt's colleagues. Pitt was true to his convictions and resigned his place. No excuse can be made for the penal laws. All that can be said is that they were the bigoted and violent reaction, caused by the violence and bigotry of James II.'s parliament in Dublin, during the brief hour when the country was at its mercv.

Henceforth the Irish Catholics were the victims of an oppression more awful than has ever been dealt out to any people or any portion of a people. Many of those Catholics were of Saxon and Norman descent, though a majority were, perhaps, pure Celts, and that they should have emerged from such persecution so little damaged by all this brutalizing tyranny, is one of the strongest evidences of the greatness of race. Education was denied them, but they gathered by the hedge side and learned from the page of Virgil the immortal tongue of Rome. Wealth and honour, freedom from shame and sorrow were offered them if they forsook their faith, but no bribe an empire had to give could make them abandon the despised religion they believed. The priest said mass when and where he could; in the lonely glen, on the desolate mountain side, in the mud hovel, in the caves of the earth, he celebrated the rites of the proscribed church; and, in his faded clothes, was armed with a talisman for the hearts of an enthusiastic people, such as no crosier of an endowed church could equal. He proved every hour his self-denial, his devotion, his sympathy; and while the rector drove to the squire's domain to enjoy his luxurious dinner, the priest shared the potato and cake of his miserable flock. The peasantry curtsey low when they meet a

priest, however familiar they may be with him, even when he is their own brother or son. The reason has often been misunderstood; it is a custom which has survived a time when the priest carried the consecrated elements constantly on his person, and when, at a favourable moment, he would make the mountain his altar; and while the language of Tiber mingled with Gaelic prayers, and the murmur of wild rills, the host would rise like a moon against the sky, now bright as the hopes of heaven and the dreams of the past, and now dark as the fate of a people for whose wrongs its recesses seemed to hoard no vengeance. The son was tempted to turn against the father, but the Irish people have remained to this day examples of strong family affection. Poverty, compared with which the condition of the poorest peasant of to-day is opulence, was ordained by law, but the chastity of the poor Irish woman passed into a proverb. She is beautiful. She is not without She has the warmth

the love of finery which belongs to her sex. of her race, but her purity has been proof against the trials of poverty and misfortune, and if in rare cases she falls, she is only half ruined; shame survives; chastity of soul outlives the degradation of the body.

Archbishop King maintained the divine right of kings until he felt the knife of James II.'s persecution. In the same way the Presbyterians supported the penal laws until they were made to suffer themselves. But the imposition of the sacramental test was well fitted to enlarge their views on the subject of liberty of conscience. By the enforcement of this test Presbyterian magistrates, military officers, members of municipal councils were deprived of their offices. In Londonderry, ten out of twelve aldermen, and fourteen out of twenty-four burgesses were declared incapable of civic trust because they would not submit to this test. Most of these had been prominent in the defence of the city during the celebrated siege. The Regium Donum was taken away under Anne, to be restored, however, under the House of Hanover.

The war of the revolution showed what the two great races in Ireland could do, and what the mixtures of these races could do.

The Ecclesiastical History of Ireland. By W. D. Killen, D.D., President of the Presbyterian College, Belfast. Dr. Killen, who speaks out against the penal laws, maintains strongly that the Treaty of Limerick was violated.

SIEGE OF DERRY.

ENGLISH JEALOUSY.

27

27

The siege of Derry is one of the most glorious things in the history of the world; the siege of Limerick was not less glorious, and the besieged achieved a victory, though the fruits of it were, unhappily alike for Protestants and Catholics, England and Ireland, destroyed by bad faith. Yet the men who fought so splendidly at Limerick, who afterwards fought so splendidly on the Continent, fought badly at the Boyne. The coward James, forgetful of his own conduct, taunted the Irish with doing what he had done. But he had had experience, and he should have known that neith or Irishmen nor Englishmen can do impossibilities, and it is impossible for raw levies to meet trained troops. The soldiers who had training fought at the Boyne as the men of their race have always fought, and those who ran away, ran away for reasons which, as William and Schomberg knew, would make Englishmen and Germans run. The main lesson to learn from this for our immediate purpose is, that Irishmen if they neglect to comply with the conditions of success cannot succeed. There is, perhaps, another lesson of a more general character but equally apposite, which may be gathered from that war and the penal laws. The loss which bigotry and oppression entail on the bigot and oppressor was never more signally shown. The bigotry of Louis XIV. sent the flower of his subjects to recruit, in the time of his utmost need, the armies of his deadliest foe. The penal laws swelled the French ranks with those heroic exiles before whose deadly charge even English valour quailed.

The jealousy of England was roused at an early period by the competition of her own colonists; and the struggle for free trade and for emancipation from English dictation, gave the world a period fruitful of splendid eloquence, and of ardent patriotism,' and it was under the spell of Flood and Grattan, the modern nation of Ireland was born. There was more of a national character about the rebellion of 1798, than of all the rebellions which preceded it. Like its predecessors, horrors ushered it in, and horrors followed in its wake. Grattan's great triumph was doomed to an early death, because inconsistent with the working of irresistible forces drawing Ireland closer to Great Britain, and making her the great liberalizer of the Empire.

• See Hallam.

Ireland has been the foremost assertor of popular rights, and an Irishman is the Chief Priest of constitutional liberalism.* Her sufferings have given the world a clearer grasp of the principles of civil and religious liberty, as her heroism has helped to extend and sustain the Empire. While her sons in the Irish and English Parliaments have expounded doctrines, she has exemplified them in her own person. Catholic emancipation and the struggles leading up to it, had an incalculable effect on the progress of the world. The Incumbered Estates Act, though it dealt out hard measure to the gentry of Ireland, affirmed a valuable proposition. Mr. Gladstone's Irish Land Bill will infallibly lead to the passing of a similar measure for England; and, in the fall of the Irish Church, outrageous abuse as it was, the English establishment heard its knell of doom. To Ireland is due the pregnant aphorism-" property has its duties as well as its rights.' An Irishman was the first writer of the English tongue who denounced the traffic in slaves.†

When we reflect on the way in which this country was kept back, its poverty, and its disturbed state, we cannot but marvel at the number of great men it has produced; they have in the midst of trouble, which might well have hopelessly distracted, left monuments of their genius in every field of science and every walk of art, nor is there a cause sacred to human freedom for which they have not nobly toiled.

We shall have to refer by and by to what Irishmen, who were for the most part Protestants, have done; it will be well here to point out how Catholic Irishmen distinguished themselves, though I would fain hope that a day of enlightenment is fast approach

"We see the different practical tendencies of the Irish and English race combined, yet distinguishable from each other in the political character of Burke, to whose writings we owe more than we are aware, the almost religious reverence with which we regard the constitution. His feelings, diffused by his eloquence, have become those of our whole nation."-Goldwin Smith's "Irish History and Irish Character," p. 19.

+ Southern. See Hallam. Thomas Southern, born 1659, died 1746, was a native of Dublin. Having studied law at the middle Temple, he entered the army, and held the rank of Captain under the Duke of York. His latter days were spent in retirement and in the enjoyment of a considerable fortune. He wrote ten plays, but only two exhibit his characteristic powers, "Oroonoko," and "Isabella." Southern's Oroonoko anticipated "Uncle Tom's Cabin."

IRISHMEN ON THE CONTINENT.

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ing, when it will be no longer necessary to dwell on these distinctions.

Towards the close of the seventeenth century Mountcashel's brigade, serving with Catinat in Italy, distinguished themselves on fields where their fathers fought two thousand years before under Hannibal. It is a waste of enthusiasm to grow dithyrambic over mercenary valour. But at this time a portion of the Irish people had no other resource. In a remarkable passage, in which Macaulay describes the crushing effect of the penal laws, he tells how Irish Roman Catholics of ability, energy, and ambition were to be found everywhere but in Ireland—at Versailles and at Saint Ildefonso, in the armies of Frederic and in the armies of Maria Theresa. Men who rose to be Marshals of France and Ministers of Spain, had they remained in their own country would have been regarded as inferior by all "the ignorant and worthless squireens who had signed the Declaration against Transubstantiation. In his palace at Madrid* he had the pleasure of being assiduously courted by the ambassador of George the Second, and of bidding defiance in high terms to the ambassador of George the Third. Scattered over all Europe were to be found Irish Counts, Irish Barons, Irish Knights of Saint Lewis and of Saint Leopold, of the White Eagle and of the Golden Fleece, who, if they had remained in the house of bondage, could not have been ensigns of marching regiments or freemen of petty corporations." In 1698, six regiments were at the siege of Valenza. While Irish campaigns were going on in Italy, the garrison of Limerick landed in France and the second brigade was formed of which the greater number assisted at the siege of Namur. In seven days Namur was taken. On the 24th July, 1692, Sarsfield-as gallant a soldier and as stainless a gentleman as ever lived-commanded the brigade, and was publicly thanked at the close. In the March following he was made a Marshal de Camp. On the 28th July in the same year, he met a death which would have been the most enviable which could have befallen him, if the cause in which he was fighting was country or humanity. It was not even the cause of France. It was the cause of a tyrant, and the founder of a tyranny

• Wall, Minister of Ferdinand the Sixth.