th his neighbours: but,
if the Roman Catholics of Munster and Connaught had turned Protestants,
they would still have continued to be a subject people. Whatever
evils the Roman Catholic suffered in England were the effects of harsh
legislation, and might have been remedied by a more liberal legislation.
But between the two populations which inhabited Ireland there was an
inequality which legislation had not caused and could not remove. The
dominion which one of those populations exercised over the other was
the dominion of wealth over poverty, of knowledge over ignorance, of
civilised over uncivilised man.

James himself seemed, at the commencement of his reign, to be perfectly
aware of these truths. The distractions of Ireland, he said, arose, not
from the differences between the Catholics and the Protestants, but
from the differences between the Irish and the English. [161] The
consequences which he should have drawn from this just proposition
were sufficiently obvious; but unhappily for himself and for Ireland he
failed to perceive them.

If only national animosity could be allayed, there could be little doubt
that religious animosity, not being kept alive, as in England, by cruel
penal acts and stringent test acts, would of itself fade away. To allay
a national animosity such as that which the two races inhabiting Ireland
felt for each other could not be the work of a few years. Yet it was a
work to which a wise and good prince might have contributed much; and
James would have undertaken that work with advantages such as none of
his predecessors or successors possessed. At once an Englishman and a
Roman Catholic, he belonged half to the ruling and half to the subject
caste, and was therefore peculiarly qualified to be a mediator between
them. Nor is it difficult to trace the course which he ought to have
pursued. He ought to have determined that the existing settlement of
landed property should be inviolable; and he ought to have announced
that determination in such a manner as effectually to quiet the anxiety
of the new proprietors, and to extinguish any wild hopes which the old
proprietors might entertain. Whether, in the great transfer of estates,
injustice had or had not been committed, was immaterial. That transfer,
just or unjust, had taken place so long ago, that to reverse it would be
to unfix the foundations of society. There must be a time of limitation
to all rights. After thirty-five years of actual pos