of that stamp, nor on the other hand was it much in danger from what remained of the Catholic gentry. They too formed a portion of Ireland savage. Excluded from every career, without education, without spirit, without refinement, equally degraded by oppression and by pity, dwarfed in mind and faint of heart, they contracted themselves to their position, and bad as it was they made the worst of it. But we might easily be too severe, for we cannot quite realize that position. Every Catholic gentleman lay under a mountain of obligation to some Protestant neighbour who in disappointment of the law he had himself framed, and which he would probably have maintained to the last extremity, held under a secret trust for the wretched Catholic, the property which the latter was disqualified from holding in his own name. The Catholic thus held his own life and the lives of all he loved, at the mercy of a single man. In spite of himself and by mere instinct he composed his face and assorted his words when dealing with a trustee who in five minutes might consign him to hunger and to rags. He learned to be meek, but not for God's sake, to be abject of neck, not humble of heart, to shiver at a frown that might be his sentence, and to play for a smile which he might note as a reprieve. Unlike the English Catholics who had a shelter for their dignity in the reserve aud coldness of the national charactar, the Irish owing to their more genial and impulsive disposition were seduced by the coarse pleasures and low ambition that solicited them. It was not for them to strive with the eloquent in oratory, with patriots in virtue, or with the brave in valour; their rivalry was with the gamester in gambling, with the sot in drinking, and with the bully in brawling. They could score bottle for bottle with any man; they could register feats of prodigious debauchery; they could tell the personal history, and deduce the pedigree of all the game-cocks or blood-horses within the four seas, but they could do no more, and were fit for nothing else. This portion therefore of Ireland savage was not very formidable to the Church Establishment, and what remained of Ireland savage was of course its champion. Never certainly had any institution of as vicious a character defenders of a much more savage nature. It would be great mistake to suppose that the Protestant was many stages in civilization before the Papist. The latter was brutalized by defeat, the former by victory. The Protestant it is true was within the reach of civilizing influences, but they failed to civilize him. The English settler in Ireland after

one or two generations lost every trace of English character. To some of the rude virtues he added all the coarser vices of the natives and superadded all his own. He became ruinously hospitable, stupidly confiding, madly brave; but on the other hand he was sudden and brutal in anger; headlong in debauch; aduellist exactly as the New Zealander is a cannibal, by appetite; arrogant where he durst be, and cringing where he durst not; of a corruption so enormous as to make ordinary profligacy seem virtue by comparison; and of a tyranny so monstrous that its cold and advised cruelties were more shocking than the sportive wickedness of Phalareus or Domitian. In fact refinement of cruelty was the only refinement known to Ireland previous to the year 1793. This, however, was another feature of barbarism. The Indian that scalps his enemy with a hatchet of flint orbarbs his arrow with a fish bone, is astute in the contrivance of tortures that never occurred to the ingenuity of Greece or Rome, and it is not surprising that the Irish barbarian should have contrived a penal code the most perfect for its purposes that could be framed by man or demon.

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It is perhaps fortunate that the laws were so very abominable, so utterly intolerable; as otherwise, and under a somewhat more indulgent rule, the Catholic population might have settled into an abject contentment, and have fared thankfully upon humble pie for centuries to come. The Dutch Protestants, quite as intolerant as the English, but more cautious, adopted the milder course. of dealing with their Catholic countrymen, and Sir William Temple has stated the result. "The Roman Catholic religion,' he says, "was alone excepted from the common protection of the laws. * * Yet such was the care of the State to give all men ease in this point, who ask no more than to serve God and save their own souls in their own way and forms, that what was not provided for by the constitutions of their government, was so in a very great degree by the con nivance of their officers, who upon constant payments from every family, suffer the exercise of the Roman Catholic religion. in their several jurisdictions as free and easy, though not so cheap and so avowed, as the rest. This, I suppose, has been the reason that, though those of this profession are very numerous in the country among the peasants, and considerable in the cities, and not admitted to any public charges, yet they seem to be a sound piece of the state, and fast jointed in with the rest; and they have neither given any disturbance to the

government, nor expressed any inclination to a change, or to any foreign power, either upon the former wars with Spain or the later invasions of the Bishop of Munster"-(Observations upon the United Provinces of the Netherlands-Works, vol. I., p. 58). The Irish Protestants, both before and after the Revolution, adopted a different course, and framed the obnoxious laws with whose history we are only too familiar. Yet these men were naturally nothing worse than other men-on the contrary it is to be presumed they had an average share of the good qualities that belong to the English nation, and it is evident there was in them no principle of repulsion to hinder their complete union with the kindly and forgiving people amongst whom they had come to live. The fault must be charged upon their position; but that position was made for them by the Church Establishment of which they were members, and for the best of all reasons, the reason that such a position was the only one in which such an Establishment could live secure and undisturbed. It was only in the meridian of Beresford and Hepenstall that the Establishment was vigorous and threatening. Outside an unmistakable and very peculiar state of barbarism, it may vegetate, but it cannot be said to live, or thrive. For the last eighty years every advance in civilization has been marked by some inroad upon the Establishment; but by inroads indicative rather of the native energy of civilization than of the well directed energy of the people. The tithe system, for instance, was felt to be incompatible with the peace and order that belong to a civilized community, but had the movements of the people been well advised, the system, instead of being reconstructed and adjusted to the imperfect civilization of the time, must have been destroyed at once, and not reserved to provoke new discontents, new agitation, and new conflicts. The natural effects of civil liberty-though clogged by religious inequality-are, however, beginning to show on the Establishment. The effects of education and reform are every day becoming more apparent, although undoubtedly, if we are to judge of Ireland by this single test of the Establishment, she is even yet one of the most uncivilized nations in the world. So late as the year 1845 Sydney Smith declared that there was no abuse like the Established Church in all Europe, in all Asia, in all the discovered parts of Africa, or in all that we had heard of Timbucktoo; and in the year 1857 we are entitled to presume that Dr. Livingstone has

found nothing like it on Lake Tchad, or he should have exhibited the uncommon monster in the Guildhall. There is, we believe, in Madagascar a something analogous. The king at his decease is buried with a gross of watches, the wardrobe of a regiment, pipes and tobacco for years, a plentiful commissariat, and a score or so of slaves to keep him company. We have thus in both countries a useless body lavishly endowed, but the analogy ceases here, for the Madagascar body is gorged once for all and dead, whereas the Irish body, far more noxious, is alive, has an appetite like Heliogabalus, and devours year by year a sum more than enough to buy the fce simple of Madagascar.

Itisconsoling, however, to know that although Ireland, the last born amongst the children of Europe as Bacon called her, is still under age; she begins to be of comely presence, and to give hope of a vigorous maturity. She has been for some time under a slow course of civilization, and every stage of her advance has been marked by danger and damage to the Establishment. It never could be otherwise, and those were right who held that the most minute atrocity of the penal laws could not be remitted with safety to the Establishment. That code was absolutely perfect totus teres atque rotundus. The current and the temperature are not more nicely adjusted to the constitution of the Victoria Regia in Chatsworth or the Regent's Park, than were the penal laws to the existence of the Establishment. Its life was purely artificial. Reduce the heat of bigotry, divert the current of passion, slacken the fires that maintain the one, derange the machinery that produces the other, and the Establishment, though it may survive, will certainly not flourish. Civilization is fatal to bigotry, it is fatal to unreason, it must therefore be fatal to the Establishment. Nothing could have been more frivolous than the attempt to secure the Establishment by the absurd and almost profane oaths imposed upon Catholics with reference to that Institution. They were so utterly futile and unmeaning, that Sir Robert Peel, the framer of them, declared, they left the discretion of Catholic members of Parliament as unfettered as that of any of their colleagues. If the Establishment had only the Catholic vote to dread it would be safe enough; but if the sense, the honesty, and the statesmanship of the Empire are concerned in its downfall, no Catholic disability can save it. The Church Establishment ran 110

risk at any time from the mere increase of political power amongst Catholics. It was the breach in the system, the admission of air and light, the march of civilization, freedom of discussion, liberality amongst Protestants, education amongst Catholics; these it was that dealt the first blow against the Establishment; these it is that are in arins against it now; these are enemies against whom no severity can avail; and whoever promotes any of them must even without thinking or intending it, strike at the existence of the Establishment. In order to endanger the Establishment, it is not indispensable to vote with Mr. Miall or the voluntaries. The Catholic that uses the privilege of Parliament to promote education, to extend the franchise, to reform the administration, to raise the condition of the poor, does by a necessary implication use his privilege to the destruction of the Church Establishment. That institution has nothing to fear from the marksman or the pauper; but it has everything to dread from the pupil of the national school, and from the master of the national school, both perhaps prosperous men of the world through means of an education which the Establishment did its utmost to intercept. It is in danger from all who read according to their opportunities great or small; from those who in the most remote and rural districts continue to see their weekly newspaper, who perhaps beg or borrow or even buy Wyse's History of the Catholic Association, or O'Connell's speech for Magee, or perhaps a file of the oid Evening Post itself, fearfully dog-eared and mutilated by tradition. It has still more to dread from the reading population of the towns, from the frequenters of Athenæums, and Institutes, and Young Men's Societies; whose small but frequent leisure has brought them into constant communion with minds not superior perhaps to their own, but better trained and furnished, and has enabled them to fill in from their own study and observation the outlines of knowledge mapped for them by lecturers or masters, and all this without prejudice to their earnest and practical religion. The Establishment may well look with apprehension to the independent farmer who in his unpretending but uniucumbered affluence has ume to think of politics and of Establishments as connected therewith; who has not death or the more abhorred work-house in prospect at the turn of every season, but may look to his deposit in the bank if his deposit in the earth should fail him. Although the man should not wear broad-cloth himself, he