men as Charlemont, Flood, and Parsons. They argued that at the
close of a long period of savage civil war it was absolutely necessary
for a small minority, who found themselves in possession of the
government and land of the country, to deprive the conquered and
hostile majority of every element of political and military strength.
This was the real object of the code. It was a measure of self-defence
justified by necessity and by the fact that it produced in Ireland for
the space of about eighty years the most perfect tranquillity.

There is much truth in these considerations, but it is also true that
the penal code produced more pernicious moral, social, and political
effects than many sanguinary persecutions. In other countries
disqualifying or persecuting laws were directed against small
fractions of the nation. In Ireland they were directed against the
bulk of the community. Being supported by little or no genuine
religious fanaticism or proselytising ardour, they made few
Protestants except in the upper orders, where many conformed in order
to keep their land or to enter professions; but they drove nearly all
the best and most energetic Catholics to the Continent; they
discouraged industry; closed the door of knowledge; taught the people
to look upon law as something hostile to religion; introduced
division and immorality into families by the rewards they offered to
apostasy; and condemned the whole country to poverty and impotence by
fatally depressing the great majority of its people. Under the
influence of the penal laws the Catholics inevitably acquired the
vices of serfs, and the Protestants the vices of monopolists. A great
portion of the code was pronounced, with good reason, to be flagrantly
opposed to the articles of the Treaty of Limerick, and it completed
the work of the confiscations by making the landlord class in Ireland
almost wholly Protestant, while the great majority of the tenantry
were Catholics.

There was a moment, however, in the beginning of the century when the
whole current of Irish history might easily have changed. Scotland had
suffered, like Ireland, from the protective policy that followed the
Revolution, and her independent Parliament had retaliated by measures
which threatened the speedy separation of the two crowns, and soon led
to a legislative Union. In Ireland such a Union was ardently desired
by enlightened Irishmen, and there is every reason to believe that it
could then have