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by severe restrictions; and in place of eleva ting the people to comfort and happiness, these laws kept them in ignorance and bondage, allowing them only to propagate their species · so as to increase and aggravate the national calamity.

In the second place, the penal laws had an evident tendency to increase ignorance and debasement of character. In making this remark, I have no inclination to fall into the error of those who ascribe to one cause all the evils which afflict Ireland. I have elsewhere endeavoured to shew, that no adequate means of instruction have ever been employed with respect to this unfortunate country; that it had no reformers, no friends, no patriots, who, by the dissemination of knowledge attacked the power of superstition, and raised the multitude from its enthralling yoke. But it surely requires no arguments to prove that when a people are systematically oppressed, and made to think meanly of themselves; when they are kept poor and dejected, and when their situation precludes them from indulging in the visions of anticipated deliverance; it is not probable that education will make much progress. In such circumstances, indeed, they can have no desire for knowledge; the mind is too much depressed to perceive its utility;

powers:

raise its aspi

It feels itself

unfits it for its sensibility

it is too deeply affected with the scene of struggling penury, of endless care and toil with which it is surrounded, to rations to the fountain of light. unhappy; and the very feeling the vigorous exercise of its is employed in cloathing with darkness and sorrow that fair universe, which, to every other being more fortunate, seems adorned with beauty and gladness: and even when it thinks of that benign Being, whose goodness and tender mercy fill that illimitable space which he inhabits, it is with sentiments, not of devotion, tranquillity, and delight, but of painful and melancholy apprehension. When such a state of mind becomes general, what a powerful barrier does it present to the progress of knowledge!

This state of mind is produced to a greater degree in Ireland by political causes, than in any other. The sensibility of the people of that country is extreme: they are easily elated with joy, or depressed with sorrow. They are strangers to that clownish stupidity which renders the peasants of some other countries incapable of any strong emotion, and consequently they cling to superstition itself, as the object of long attachment, closer than those of less lively feelings. To persecute them for

what they consider the true religion, is the way to make their zeal for it more obstinate, and to render their opposition to every scheme of mental improvement irresistible.

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But it is not merely as it regards education, that the penal laws have been injurious: their influence has been extremely hostile to the interests of morality. It is impossible for any one to travel in Ireland, without observing that they have made a character naturally open and unsuspecting, jealous, and in some instances deceitful. They have operated as a check to the exercise of the tender and endearing charities of life: they have literally attempted to divide the father against the son, and the son against the father. They have placed the people in circumstances in which prevarication and cheating are natural; in which the low vices of savage life are produced.-Perhaps it may be said that this would have been the case though the penal laws had never existed, and that all the evil with which they are fairly chargeable, is the greater permanency which they have given to circumstances favourable to immorality. And is not this evil sufficiently great? But the actual injury which they have occasioned is still greater: the people of Ireland were originally poor, but they rendered them still

poorer: the calamities of long-continued hostilities depressed them, and enured them to the commission of crimes; but they debased their character, and made them aliens in the land of their fathers. How could men be supposed to regard their duty to God or to man in a country, where political arrangements occasioned the feelings described in the following passage?" The idea of a protestant in the "mind of a Roman catholic, and that of the "latter in the mind of the former, now became "closely associated with every idea that could "engender wrath, malice, and vengeance in "the heart of man. Each abhorred the other: "each longed for the extirpation of the other; "and it seems no wise improbable that the "more powerful of the two would have pro"ceeded to still greater extremities than it "did, had not the government of Britain been

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directed by a certain Machiavelian maxim, "which does not appear to have been wholly "discarded, at least before the accomplishment "of the union." *

In the last place, the penal laws have essentially contributed to retard the progress of the reformation in Ireland, and consequently to injure the protestant church established in that

Newenham's Commercial Advant. of Ireland

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country. That policy which is unjust is generally short-sighted, and often does extensive injury in a direction very different from that which is originally intended. And it seems a self-evident maxim that no party of great numerical power in a nation can be permanently depressed, without affecting the prosperous movements of the whole community with which it is connected. This remark certainly holds true in a religious point of view, as well as in a political. It may be highly expedient, on various accounts, that in a country where the majority profess christianity, a church should be established, and that its clergy should possess such immunities and privileges as may be deemed necessary to give due influence to their character: but it is so far from being essential to the existence or prosperity of this institution that dissenters should be irritated by test or penal laws, and degraded in the estimation of all their fellow-subjects, that these measures certainly retard the progress of the one, and put to extreme hazard the continuance of the other.

What is the design of an ecclesiastical establishment? No one maintains that the origin of such an institution is of divine authority. The religion, indeed, whose pure and spiritual interests it is intended to promote, comes from

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