refused to allow the English to interfere with his continental designs; and their tame agreement made peace quite easy, though a peace which ignored the whole question of the balance of power on the Continent could only be a temporary truce. On 25th March 1802 the Treaty of Amiens was concluded on the following terms :

(a) England was to restore to France and her allies all her conquests except Trinidad, conquered from Spain, and Ceylon, conquered from the Batavian Republic (Holland). (b) Turkey was to be included in the peace, and to lose no territories. (c) Malta (recently conquered by England from France) was to be restored to the Knights of St. John.

The wars against the French Revolution were thus, like the Revolution itself, at an end, though not before the old society was almost shattered, and the old political balance of Europe, already rudely assailed by the grasping selfishness of Frederick the Great, completely overthrown by Buonaparte. England had struggled bravely and constantly, and, under Pitt, had "weathered the storm," but had paid a heavy price by losing much of her liberty, and suffering much distress from high prices and heavy war

taxes.

The Penal
Code.

CHAPTER V.

Ireland in the Eighteenth Century.

1. During the first half of the eighteenth century the absolute Protestant Ascendency established by William III.'s victories went on. A Penal Code was bit by bit drawn up which took away from Irish Roman Catholics nearly everything that made life worth living. The Catholic worship was never wholly put down, but the priests were registered, and ordered to take an abjuration oath which their Church thought sinful. Nonjuring priests and all bishops, monks, and friars were felons liable to death, and were therefore at the mercy of any informer. Priest-hunting became a trade, and the Roman Catholic bishops were forced to lurk in disguise out in the bogs or on the mountains.

No Catholic could hold any office or vote at any election. No Catholic could be a sheriff, a member of Parliament, a barrister, an attorney, or a gamekeeper, and in most towns corporation by-laws shut him out from the higher branches

of trade. He could not bear the sword which was the mark of a gentleman without a licence that was hard to get. If he owned horses, any Protestant could force him to sell them for five pounds apiece. He could not send his children to a school of his own faith, either at home or abroad. He could not hold land by lease for more than thirty-one years, and if the profit was more than one-third of the rent, the lease could be handed over to the Protestant who found it out. If the son of a Catholic landlord turned Protestant, he could turn his father's estate into a rentcharge for life, and secure the succession over his brothers. To prevent Catholics holding large estates, their lands were equally divided at their death among their children. A still coarser inducement to turn Protestant was the system of Charter Schools started in 1733 to 66 rescue the souls of thousands of poor children from the danger of Popish superstition and idolatry, and their bodies from the miseries of idleness and beggary." But "such was the bigotry of the deluded people that nothing but absolute want could prevail on them to suffer their children to receive an education which endangered their salvation." Only in times of famine were the Charter Schools filled.

The Catholics were described by Lords-Lieutenant as the 66 common enemy." The best and bravest found in the service of foreign kings the career foolishly and cruelly denied them at home. The rest lived out a hopeless and spiritless life in their native land. Yet they clung bravely to their faith, and the country was covered with mass-houses and swarming with priests, for the penal laws were too wicked to be fully carried out even by the tyrants that had passed them.

2. In every other way the state of the peasantry was very wretched. The land was owned almost altogether by Protestants, who were too often either absentee The Land grandees or wasteful and poverty-stricken System. squireens. To save trouble the larger landlords let out their land to middlemen, and there were often three or four of these between the owner and the actual tiller of the soil. In the richer districts there were large grazing farms which did very well, but gave little work to labourers. But a large mass of the soil was let out in patches of a few acres to miserable cottiers, who paid everything away in rent, except what barely kept them and their large families alive. Thrift, industry, foresight were impossible under such a system. “What with the severe exactions of rent, of the

parish clergyman, who, not content with the tithe of grain, exacts even the very tenth of the potatoes; of the Catholic priest, who comes armed with the terrors of damnation, and demands his full quota, the poor reduced wretches have hardly the skin of a potato left them to subsist on." "The highroads throughout the south and west are lined with beggars, who live in cabins of such shocking materials that you may see the smoke ascending from every inch of the roof, and the rain drops on the half-naked, shivering, and almost halfstarving inhabitants within." "The landlords get all that is made off the land, and the peasants poverty and potatoes." "For," says Dean Swift, "it is the usual practice of the Irish tenant rather than want land to offer more than he knoweth he can ever be able to pay; in that case he groweth desperate and payeth nothing at all." "The Irish tenants," said Swift again, "lived worse than English beggars." As the century grew older their troubles increased, for in 1735 pasture-lands were practically relieved from tithe, and the landlords turned their land into pasture. The cottiers were driven to the mountains of Kerry and Connaught, whence they wandered in the summer in search of work to pay their rents. There were few factories to take away the people from the land. The English Parliament, moved by the English merchants, who were afraid of Irish competition, had put down the Irish woollen trade. The Navigation Acts still crippled Irish commerce, and the linen-trade of Ulster was of itself not enough to give work to the landless poor. There was a large number of Protestant emigrants, but few Catholics now left their native land.

3. The Irish Protestants were not without their grievances. The Presbyterians settled in Ulster were shut by a Grievances of Test Act out of all offices under the Crown, the Protestants. though they had in the Regium Donum a small State endowment for their Church, and their common interests with the Established Church as a Protestant minority made their position much better than that of English Dissenters. But all Irish Protestants bitterly resented the ascendency which England had over all Irish affairs. Poynings Act, passed in the reign of Henry VII., and strengthened by a Declaratory Act of George I., provided that no law should be brought forward in the Irish Parliament until it had been approved by the English Privy Council. The English Parliament constantly passed laws binding on Ireland; for example, the Act which finally put down the woollen trade, from which the wealthy Pro

testants of course suffered most. Most of the revenue of the Crown in Ireland was hereditary, and outside the control of the Irish Parliament. The Irish Parliament was in some ways in greater need of reform than the English. More than half its members were returned by proprietors of boroughs. There was no Septennial Act, Mutiny Act, or Habeas Corpus Act. George II.'s Parliament sat all through his reign without re-election.

The chief posts in Church and State were always given to Englishmen. Friends of the Government who were too bad to be helped in England got pensions and places in Ireland. The Established Church was used as a political means of upholding the English connection, and did its spiritual work so badly that the poorer Protestants got little good from it. Dean Swift speaks with bitter scorn of the way in which Church patronage was abused. "Excellent and moral men have been selected on every vacancy. But it unfortunately has uniformly happened that as these worthy divines crossed Hounslow Heath to take possession of their bishoprics, they have been regularly robbed and murdered by the highwaymen frequenting that common, who seized upon their robes and patents, come over to Ireland, and are consecrated bishops in their stead." true Irish bishop,” says one of their own order, “has nothing more to do than to eat, drink, grow fat, rich, and die." Yet of one important district it was said : In many parishes the churches are wholly demolished, and several clergymen have each of them four or five. They commonly live in Dublin, leaving the conduct of their Popish parishioners to priests of their own persuasion."

"A

4. There were brighter sides to Irish life. Neighbourly good feeling often prevented Protestants from putting the Penal Code into force. There was often kindly Better aspects fellowship even between landlords and tenants, of Irish for the worst oppressors were not so much the Society. large landowners as greedy middlemen of low rank, often Catholics, and as ignorant as the peasantry they ground down. With all their poverty Arthur Young found the "common Irish voluble, cheerful, and lively; as spiritedly active in play as lazy in work; hospitable, despite their poverty, to all comers; warm friends, hard drinkers, great liars, but civil, submissively obedient, and great dancers." There was considerable intellectual activity here and there among the better class of Irish Protestants; and even with the natives Arthur Young notes the hedge schools and schools

for men who were being brought up as priests. Jonathan Swift, Dean of St. Patrick's, the greatest of English satirists, found his eagerest and most devoted readers in Ireland. Berkeley, the great philosopher, was Bishop of Cloyne. Francis Hutcheson, the founder of the "Scotch" philosophy, was an Irish Presbyterian. Burke, the wisest of Whig statesmen, Goldsmith, poet and novelist, and Sterne, the humorist, all came from Ireland. In 1731 the Dublin Society was established to promote the arts, manufactures, and husbandry of Ireland.

Dublin was still the second city in the empire, with about 120,000 inhabitants. Its Parliament House, Four Courts, and other public buildings, were magnificent, and its University was, in Chesterfield's opinion, better than those of England. The agreeable and hearty society of Dublin was contrasted strongly by Arthur Young with the brutality and recklessness of "the little country gentlemen, your fellows with round hats edged with gold, who hunt in the day, get drunk in the evening, and fight the next morning." Handel chose to bring out his Messiah in Dublin rather than in London. The theatres were as good as those of London itself. Belfast was, says Young, "a well-built town of brick, lively and busy, with 15,000 inhabitants." Cork had a population of 70,000.

ment.

5. The local government of Ireland was carried on by the grand juries of gentry, who had much the same powers The System of as quarter sessions in England. The central Irish Govern- government was in the hands of the Lord Lieutenant, his Chief Secretary, the Irish Privy Council, and the permanent officials that collectively made up Dublin Castle, though all were subject to the control of the English cabinet. But the Lord Lieutenant, always a great English nobleman, only lived in Ireland during the short sessions of the Irish Parliament every other year. When he was away his place was filled by Lords Justices, who were generally great ecclesiastics like Primates Boulter and Stone, or the chief owners of Irish boroughs, such as the Ponsonbys and the Beresfords, who, in return for a large share of patronage, undertook to carry on the king's business, and were therefore called Undertakers. Hence there was for a long time hardly any opposition in the Irish Parliament to Government measures.

6. There was a strong and growing disgust at the English Government and their Irish agents. The Catholics at first had no share in this. Even in 1715 and 1745 the Jacobite