ietary of
the country belonged to one religion, while the great majority of their
tenants were of another. The Catholics, excluded from almost every
possibility of eminence, deprived of their natural leaders, and
consigned by the Legislature to utter ignorance, soon sank into the
condition of broken and dispirited helots. A total absence of industrial
virtues, a cowering and abject deference to authority, a recklessness
about the future, a love of secret illegal combinations, became general
among them. Above all, they learned to regard law as merely the
expression of force, and its moral weight was utterly destroyed. For the
greater part of a century, the main object of the Legislature was to
extirpate a religion by the encouragement of the worst, and the
punishment of some of the best qualities of our nature. Its rewards were
reserved for the informer, for the hypocrite, for the undutiful son, or
for the faithless wife. Its penalties were directed against religious
constancy and the honest discharge of ecclesiastical duty.

"It would, indeed, be scarcely possible to conceive a more infamous
system of legal tyranny than that which in the middle of the eighteenth
century crushed every class and almost every interest in Ireland."[32]

But laws were not only passed against the native race and the national
religion. Measures were taken to destroy the industries of the country,
and to involve natives and colonists, Protestants and Catholics, in
common ruin. Mr. Lecky shall tell the story.

"The commercial and industrial condition of the country was, if
possible, more deplorable than its political condition, and was the
result of a series of English measures which for deliberate and selfish
tyranny could hardly be surpassed. Until the reign of Charles II. the
Irish shared the commercial privileges of the English; but as the island
had not been really conquered till the reign of Elizabeth, and as its
people were till then scarcely removed from barbarism, the progress was
necessarily slow. In the early Stuart reigns, however, comparative
repose and good government were followed by a sudden rush of prosperity.
The land was chiefly pasture, for which it was admirably adapted; the
export of live cattle to England was carried on upon a large scale, and
it became a chief source of Irish wealth. The English landowners,
however, took the alarm. They complained that Irish rivalry in the
cattle market was reducing English rents; and a