arce a single
enactment, and not a single stringent enactment, imposing any penalty on
Papists as such. On our side of Saint George's Channel every priest who
received a neophyte into the bosom of the Church of Rome was liable to
be hanged, drawn, and quartered. On the other side he incurred no such
danger. A Jesuit who landed at Dover took his life in his hand; but he
walked the streets of Dublin in security. Here no man could hold office,
or even earn his livelihood as a barrister or a schoolmaster, without
previously taking the oath of supremacy, but in Ireland a public
functionary was not held to be under the necessity of taking that oath
unless it were formally tendered to him. [149] It therefore did not
exclude from employment any person whom the government wished
to promote. The sacramental test and the declaration against
transubstantiation were unknown nor was either House of Parliament
closed against any religious sect.

It might seem, therefore, that the Irish Roman Catholic was in a
situation which his English and Scottish brethren in the faith might
well envy. In fact, however, his condition was more pitiable and
irritating than theirs. For, though not persecuted as a Roman Catholic,
he was oppressed as an Irishman. In his country the same line of
demarcation which separated religions separated races; and he was of the
conquered, the subjugated, the degraded race. On the same soil dwelt two
populations, locally intermixed, morally and politically sundered. The
difference of religion was by no means the only difference, and was
perhaps not even the chief difference, which existed between them. They
sprang from different stocks. They spoke different languages. They had
different national characters as strongly opposed as any two national
characters in Europe. They were in widely different stages of
civilisation. Between two such populations there could be little
sympathy; and centuries of calamities and wrongs had generated a strong
antipathy. The relation in which the minority stood to the majority
resembled the relation in which the followers of William the Conqueror
stood to the Saxon churls, or the relation in which the followers of
Cortes stood to the Indians of Mexico.

The appellation of Irish was then given exclusively to the Celts and to
those families which, though not of Celtic origin, had in the course of
ages degenerated into Celtic manners. These people, probably somewhat
under a million in nu