al for its atmosphere. And to
this affection for the actual in the English moderates must be added (in
what proportion we know not) a persecuting hatred of Popery almost
maniacal but quite sincere. The State had long, as we have seen, been
turned to an engine of torture against priests and the friends of
priests. Men talk of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes; but the
English persecutors never had so tolerant an edict to revoke. But at
least by this time the English, like the French, persecutors were
oppressing a minority. Unfortunately there was another province of
government in which they were still more madly persecuting the
majority. For it was here that came to its climax and took on its
terrific character that lingering crime that was called the government
of Ireland. It would take too long to detail the close network of
unnatural laws by which that country was covered till towards the end of
the eighteenth century; it is enough to say here that the whole attitude
to the Irish was tragically typified, and tied up with our expulsion of
the Stuarts, in one of those acts that are remembered for ever. James
II., fleeing from the opinion of London, perhaps of England, eventually
found refuge in Ireland, which took arms in his favour. The Prince of
Orange, whom the aristocracy had summoned to the throne, landed in that
country with an English and Dutch army, won the Battle of the Boyne, but
saw his army successfully arrested before Limerick by the military
genius of Patrick Sarsfield. The check was so complete that peace could
only be restored by promising complete religious liberty to the Irish,
in return for the surrender of Limerick. The new English Government
occupied the town and immediately broke the promise. It is not a matter
on which there is much more to be said. It was a tragic necessity that
the Irish should remember it; but it was far more tragic that the
English forgot it. For he who has forgotten his sin is repeating it
incessantly for ever.

But here again the Stuart position was much more vulnerable on the side
of secular policy, and especially of foreign policy. The aristocrats to
whom power passed finally at the Revolution were already ceasing to have
any supernatural faith in Protestantism as against Catholicism; but they
had a very natural faith in England as against France; and even, in a
certain sense, in English institutions as against French institutions.
And just as these men, the most unmed