rians were enrolled in that formidable
revolutionary organization known as the Volunteers, that a test which
had excluded them from all share in the government of their adopted
country for seventy-four years was repealed. As for the Catholics, the
small measure of legal relief granted to them excited no opposition
anywhere. Parts of the Penal Code, especially the laws against worship
and the clergy, had become inoperative with time and the sheer
impossibility of enforcement. The religion, naturally, had thriven under
persecution, so that in spite of the Code's manifold temptations to
recant, only four thousand converts had been registered in the last
fifty years. The laws designed to safeguard the wholesale confiscations
of the previous century had long ago achieved their purpose, and men
were beginning to perceive the fatal economic effects of keeping the
great mass of the people poor and ignorant. The real spirit of
toleration shown in the enactments of 1778, the most important of which
enabled Catholics to obtain land on a lease of 999 years, was small
enough if we consider the quiescence of the Catholics for generations
past, the absence of all tendency in them towards counter-persecution,
or even towards intolerance of Protestantism in any of its forms,
Quaker, Huguenot, Episcopalian, Presbyterian, or Methodist, in spite of
their own overwhelming numbers and of the burning grievance of the
tithes. Politically they were a source of great strength to the
Government. When the Presbyterians condemned the American War, the
Catholic leaders memorialized the Government in favour of it as warmly
as the tame majority in Parliament.

Conservatives by religion, their devotion to authority annulled all
instincts of revenge for the hideous wrongs of the past. The Government,
now on the verge of a war with the two great Catholic Powers of Europe,
began to realize this, and to feel the wisdom of some degree of
conciliation. After all, only four years before they had not merely
tolerated, but established, the Catholic Church in the conquered
province of Quebec, with the result that the French Canadians remained
loyal during the American War. But neither the Government nor the finest
independent men in Parliament--not even Grattan--entertained the
remotest idea of admitting Irish Catholics to any really effective share
in the Government which their loyalty made stable. That noble but
hopeless conception originated later, as the dyn