In every walk of life the Catholic was pursued by persecution or restriction. Except in the linen trade, he could not have more than two apprentices. He could not possess a horse of the value of more than five pounds, and any Protestant, on giving him five pounds, could take his horse. He was compelled to pay double to the militia. He was forbidden, except under particular conditions, to live in Galway or Limerick. In case of war with a Catholic power, the Catho lics were required to reimburse the damage done by the enemy's privateers. The Legislature, it is true, did not venture absolutely to suppress their worship, but it existed only by a doubtful connivance-stigmatized as if it were a species of licensed prostitution, and subject to conditions which, if they had been enforced, would have rendered its continuance impossible. An old law which prohibited it, and another which enjoined attendance at the Anglican worship, remained unrepealed, and might at any time be revived; and the former was, in fact, enforced during the Scotch rebellion of 1715. The parish priests, who alone were allowed to officiate, were compelled to be registered, and were forbidden to keep curates, or to officiate anywhere except in their own parishes. The chapels might not have bells or steeples. No crosses might be publicly erected. Pilgrimages to the holy wells. were forbidden. Not only all monks and friars, but also all Catholic archbishops, bishops, deacons, and other dignitaries, were ordered by a certain day to leave the country; and if, after that date, they were found in Ireland, they were liable to be first imprisoned, and then banished; and if, after that banishment, they returned to discharge their duty in their dioceses, they were liable to the punishment of death. To facilitate the discovery of offenses against the code, two justices of the peace might at any time compel any Catholic of eighteen years of age to declare when and where he last heard mass, what persons were present, and who officiated; and, if he refused to give evidence, they might

imprison him for twelve months, or until he paid a fine of twenty pounds. Any one who harbored ecclesiastics from beyond the seas was subject to fines which, for the third offense, amounted to the confiscation of all his goods. A graduated scale of rewards was offered for the discovery of Catholic bishops, priests, and school-masters; and a resolution of the House of Commons pronounced "the prosecuting and informing against Papists" " an honorable service to the government."

Such were the principal articles of this famous codea code which Burke truly described as "well digested and well disposed in all its parts; a machine of wise and elaborate contrivance, and as well fitted for the oppression, impoverishment, and degradation of a people, and the debasement in them of human nature itself, as ever proceeded from the perverted ingenuity of man." It was framed by a small minority of the nation for the oppression of the majority, who remained faithful to the religion of their fathers. It was framed by men who boasted that their creed rested upon private judgment, and whose descendants are never weary of declaiming upon the intolerance of popery; and it was directed, in many of its provisions, against mere religious observances; and was in all its parts so strictly a code of religious persecution, that any Catholic might be exempted from its operation by simply forsaking his religion. It was framed and enforced, although by the treaty of Limerick the Catholics had been guaranteed such privileges in the exercise of their religion as they enjoyed in the reign of Charles II., although the sovereign at the same time promised, as soon as his affairs would permit, "to summon a Parliament in this kingdom, and to endeavor to procure the said Roman Catholics such further security in that particular as may preserve them from any disturbance on account of their religion, although not a single overt act of treason was proved against them, and although they remained passive spectators of two

rebellions which menaced the very existence of the Protestant dynasty in England.

The economical and moral effects of the penal laws were profoundly disastrous. The productive energies of the nation. were fatally diminished. Almost all Catholics of energy and talent who refused to abandon their faith emigrated to foreign lands. The relation of classes was permanently vitiated, for almost all of the land-holders 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, 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 some 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.

The history of the penal laws should furnish a lasting warning to persecutors of all religions. Arthur Young asserts that the numerical proportion of the Roman Catholics in Ireland was not even diminished, if any thing, the reverse; and that it was admitted, by those who asserted the contrary, that it would take four thousand years, according to the then rate of progress, to convert them. It was stated in Parliament that

only four thousand and fifty-five had conformed in seventyone years under the system; and what little the religion may have lost in number it gained in intensity. The poorer classes in Ireland emerged from their long ordeal, penetrated with an attachment to their religion almost unparalleled in Europe. With the exception of the inhabitants of Bavaria and the Tyrol, there is, perhaps, no nation in Europe whose character has been so completely molded and permeated by it, or in which skeptical doubts are more completely unknown.

The code perished at last by its own atrocity. It became, after a time, so out of harmony with the prevailing tone of Irish opinion that it ceased to be enforced, and the Irish Protestants took the initiative in obtaining its mitigation.

LVI.

IMPEACHMENT OF HASTINGS.-MACAULAY.

[Ireland was still in a state of agitation when the attention of the English Parliament became absorbed in one of the most remarkable of modern criminal trials. In 1773 Warren Hastings was made the first governor-general of India. During the twelve years of his administration he rendered inestimable service in extending and consolidating England's power in the East, but his glory was sullied by many crimes. Soon after his retirement from office he was impeached (1788) by the House of Commons, before the bar of the Lords, on charges of misgovernment in India. The trial dragged on for eight years, and, in the end, Hastings was acquitted; but the object for which the impeachment had been begun was attained. The crimes of Hastings have never been repeated, even by the worst of his successors.]

In the mean time the preparations for the trial had proceeded rapidly, and, on the 13th of February, 1788, the sittings of the court commenced. There have been spectacles more dazzling to the eye, more gorgeous with jewelry and

cloth of gold, more attractive to grown-up children than that which was then exhibited at Westminster; but, perhaps, there never was a spectacle so well calculated to strike a highly cultivated, a reflecting, an imaginative mind. All the various kinds of interest which belong to the near and to the distant, to the present and to the past, were collected on one spot, and in one hour. All the talents and all the accomplishments which are developed by liberty and civilization were now displayed, with every advantage that could be derived from co-operation and from contrast. Every step in the proceedings carried the mind either backward, through many troubled centuries, to the days when the foundations of our constitution were laid, or far away, over boundless seas and deserts, to dusky nations living under strange stars, worshiping strange gods, and writing strange characters from right to left. The High Court of Parliament was to sit, according to forms handed down from the days of the Plantagenets, on an Englishman accused of exercising tyranny over the lord of the holy city of Benares, and over the ladies of the princely house of Oude.

The place was worthy of such a trial. It was the great hall of William Rufus, the hall which had resounded with acclamations at the inauguration of thirty kings, the hall which had witnessed the just sentence of Bacon and the just absolution of Somers, the hall where the eloquence of Strafford had for a moment awed and melted a victorious party inflamed with just resentment, the hall where Charles had confronted the High Court of Justice with the placid courage which has half-redeemed his fame. Neither military nor civil pomp was wanting. The avenues were lined with grenadiers. The streets were kept clear by cavalry. The peers, robed in gold and ermine, were marshaled by the heralds under garter king-at-arms. The judges, in their vestments of state, attended to give advice on points of law. Near a hundred and seventy lords, three fourths of the Upper House,