Fragments; Some Forgotten Aspects of the Irish Question, Buddhism and Jainism, A National Theater [pp. 363-374]

FRAGMENTS. 365
the family affections. If a son declared himself
Protestant, which he might do in boyhood, a third
of his father's fortune was at once applied to his use;
the father's estate was secured to him as heir, a life rent merely being left to the father. A father's set tlement to the prejudice of the heir-at-law might be
instantly defeated by the heir becoming Protestant.
If the heir continued a Papist, the estate gaveledwent in equal shares to the sons-a modification of
old Irish law introduced to break up the estates of
the Papists, so that none should be on the land above
the condition of a beggar. If there were no sons it
gaveled on the daughters; if no children, then on
the collaterals. Papists who had lost their lands,
and had grown rich in commerce, could neither buy
land nor lend their money on heritable security.
The Papists could get no hold, direct or indirect,
upon the soil. Even a lease to a Papist, to be legal,
must have been short. Any Papist above sixteen
years of age might be called on to take the oath of
abjuration, and, on thrice declining, he suffered a
proemunire. If he entertained a priest or a bishop,
he was fined; for a third offense he forfeited his
whole fortune. The exercise of his religion was
forbidden; its chapels were shut up; its priests banished, and hanged if they returned home.... A
Papist could not enter the profession of the law.
He could not marry a Protestant (the fatal Kilkenny provision against mixing over again). He could
neither vote at vestries, nor serve on grand juries,
nor act as a constable, as a sheriff, or under-sheriff,
or a magistrate. He could neither vote at elections
nor sit in Parliament. In short, he wvas excluded
from any office of public trust or emolument. "The
Catholics," says Sir H. Parnell, "in place of being
the free subjects of a prince from whom they were
taught to expect only justice and mercy, were made
the slaves of every one, even of the meanest of their
Protestant countrymen." Had they become mere
slaves they might have expected some degree of humane treatment; but, as the policy which had made
them slaves held them at the same time as the natu.
ral and interested enemies of their masters, they
were doomed to experience -all the oppression of
tyranny without any of the chances, which other
slaves enjoy, of the tyrants being merciful, and feeling their tyranny secure.
In short, the Irish Roman Catholics who survived their persecutions were literally dispossessed
of their native country. Lord Clare, the Irish
Lord Chancellor at the time of the Union, made
that statement in his place in Parliament. After
showing that "the whole land of Ireland had
been confiscated, with the exception of the estates
of five or six families of English blood," and that
"no inconsiderable portion of the island had been
confiscated twice, or perhaps thrice, in the course
of a century," he goes on to make the following
remarkable declaration:
"The situation therefore of the Irish nation at the
Revolution (of x688) stands unparalleled in the his
tory of the inhabited world. If the wars of England,
carried on here from the reign of Elizabeth, had been
waged against a foreign enemy, the inhabitants would
have retained their possessions under the established
law of civilized nations"; but the policy of England
was "a declaration of perpetual war against the na tives of Ireland, and it has rendered her a blank
amid the nations of Europe, and retarded her prog ress in the civilized world."
Of the Irish landlords he says that "confiscation is their common title; and from their first
settlement they have been hemmed in by the old
inhabitants brooding over their discontent in sullen indignation." One of the great evils of our
dealing with Ireland is, that we have persisted in
governing her according to English prejudices
and ideas. Not thus have we dealt with India,
or French Canada, or even the Isle of Man and
the Channel Islands. The land tenure of Ireland
was altogether different from that of England.
The land belonged to the sept, not to the chief,
or to any of his vassals. This was forgotten or
ignored when the lands of chiefs were declared
forfeit and granted to fresh landlords. The occupiers, on the other hand, regarded these lands
as their own; and this idea, founded originally
in fact, has never passed clean out of their minds,
and it lies at the root of a good deal of the present land agitation. It was not a mere class which
the confiscations disinherited and uprooted from
the soil, but the entire race of Irishmen; and
these still cherish the tradition that they are the
lawful owners of the land.
And, as if it were not enough to have divorced
a whole nation from the soil which gave it birth,
and which of right belonged to it, the ingenuity
of English statecraft found other means of completing the ruin of Ireland. Till Queen Elizabeth's reign the Irish had a flourishing trade in
supplying England with cattle. This was supposed to depreciate rents in England, and Irish
cattle were accordingly declared by act of Parliament "a nuisance," and their importation was
forbidden. Thereupon the Irish killed their cattle at home and sent them to England as salted
meat. This provoked another act of Parliament,
forbidding in perpetuity the importation of all
cattle from Ireland, "dead or alive, great or small,
fat or lean." Nevertheless, the Lord-Lieutenant
appealed to Ireland on behalf of the sufferers
from the great fire of London. The Irish were
wretchedly poor, and had no gold or silver to
spare; but they sent a handsome contribution in
cattle. This gift the landed interest in England
resented in loud and angry tones as "a political
contrivance to defeat the prohibition of Irish cattle." Driven to their wits' ends, the Irish turned
the hides of their cattle into leather, which they
exported to England. But here too they were
FRA G.4fENTS.
365