e a
desperate effort to reverse their fortunes and replace the land of the
country mainly in Catholic hands. The battle of the Boyne shattered
the Catholic hopes, and it was followed by a new confiscation, by a
new emigration of the ablest and most energetic Catholics, by a long
period of commercial restraints, penal laws, and complete Protestant
ascendancy.

The commercial restraints formed part of a protective policy which was
at that time general in Europe, and which was severely felt in the
American colonies. Though it did not absolutely originate in, it was
greatly intensified by, the Revolution, which gave the manufacturing
and commercial classes a new power in English government. The linen
manufacture was spared, but the total destruction by law of the
flourishing woollen manufacture, followed by a number of restrictions
imposed on other branches of industry, deprived Ireland of her most
promising sources of wealth, drove great multitudes of energetic
Protestants out of the country, and threw the people more and more
upon the soil as almost their sole means of support.

The penal laws against the Catholics accompanied or closely followed
the commercial restraints. The blame of them may be divided with some
equality between the Government of England and the Parliament of
Ireland. It was the Irish Parliament which enacted these laws, but an
English Act first made the Irish Parliament exclusively Protestant,
and the whole legislation was carried at a time when the Irish
Parliament was completely dependent, and incompetent even to discuss
any measure without the previous approbation of the English
Government. In order to judge this legislation with equity, it must be
remembered that in the beginning of the eighteenth century restrictive
laws against Protestantism in Catholic countries, and against
Catholicism in Protestant ones, almost universally prevailed. The laws
against Irish Catholics were, on the whole, less stringent than those
against Catholics in England. They were largely modelled after the
French legislation against the Huguenots, but persecution in Ireland
never approached in severity that of Louis XIV., and was absolutely
insignificant compared with that which had extirpated Protestantism
and Judaism from Spain. The code, however, was not mainly the product
of religious feeling, but of policy, and in this respect it has been
defended in its broad outlines, though not in all its details, by such
Irish