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It is quite possible that some objection will be taken to the curtness of style adopted in the early part of this lecture. In justification I must explain that it was originally given as two lectures. From a large number of citizens came a request for the redelivery of them, and I gave the two in a condensed form. . In giving the lecture to the public in print, it is necessary that I should affirm its correctness ; >for a pamphlet has been published purporting to be my lecture, whereas it is only an inaccurate report by a shorthand Triter, who was engaged by a patent medicine «nan. Reference to the note at the end of the lecture will show what 1 am doing for self protection. A. J. B. Montreal, 6th January, 1881. \ 154287 3 REMARKS OF DR. KINGSTON. Ladies and Gentlemen, It is with much pleasure I have acceded to the request that I should occupy the chair on the occasion of the delivery of a lecture by the Rev. Mr. Bray. It is customary, I believe, for a Chairman to foreshadow, in a degree, the ground to h& traversed by the lecturer — to speak briefly of the obstacle 3 in the way, the difficulties to be met with, and the dangers to be avoided ; but, as the lecturer has not shown me his manuscript, I am unable to say what obstacles he may have met with, nor how they have been avoided or overcome. But I am confident that, from the lecturer's past reputation — if soil is to be upturned, it will be soil prolific with kindness ; if obstacles are to be overcome, they will be overcome manfully ; if human prejudices are to be faced, they will be faced boldly and honestly ; and if streams are to be met with, or even the channel itself arched over, he will throw over them arches of peace. With these remarks I beg to introduce to you the Rev. Mr. Bray. ENGLAND AND IRELAND. Mr. Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen, I BEG you to believe that I felt it, and still feel it, no small honour, to be invited to deliver my lecture again on Eng- land and Ireland. Such a compliment is not often paid to any man, and I am vain enough to think that there is some usefulness attached to it, or good to be got from it» or you would not have demanded its reproduction in this form and place. But I am bound to say that I wish the demand had come from a larger number of Englishmen and Scotch. I wish the bills announcing the lecture had been headed Englishmen as well as Irishmen, for, truth to tell friends, I had more thought of the English than of the Irish, when I decided upon the first delivery of the lectures. I knew that the Irish had no need of education in the history of their nation : they know the story of every scar upon the mutilated body of Ireland. It has been burnt into their memory, and will not easily be effaced. But I wanted English people to look upon those scars, and know how they were got. I wanted them to know Lecture hy Rev. A, J, Bray, I tho causes of this periodic ont])urst of diricontcnt in Ireland. They were sayinj^, what is the nuitttu' with those Irish ? Is it because there is soniethiuL,' peculiar in Celtic blood, which makes an Irishman never ha])])y unless he is lighting, that there is trouble again ? Is this new ditliculty a thing to be battered into silence by the policeman's club, or to be driven into hiding by threats of buckshot ? or is there some real reason, palpable and sound, for the complaint ? I made an effort to answer that question. I knew that the English ])eo^>le are a just people, that the vast majority of them desire to right the wrongs their fathers did, and that very many of them are by no means unwilling to start the battle for better land laws in Ireland, that it may extend to England by and by. I want, if I can, to strengthen the hands of Gladstone and Bright ; I want to put in a plea for justice ; and I want to bring Englishmen and Irishmen together in this matter, that they may understand each other, and, with joined forces, promote the sacred cause of right. I thought I could best accomplish that by laying the matter in bold outline before my audience. So I told the story, — told it with extreme carefulness, and an honest effort to bs fair* I. have been complimented on the bravery displayed in doing that. Ladies and Gentlemen, I was not conscious of the exercise ' of any courage whatever. It never occurred to me that I was doing a brave thing, for I like to " tell the truth and shame the devil," — there is real pleasure to be got from the operation. And then, just because I am an Englishman, I know that I can afford to criticise my country — own her wrongs of past and present. She has not been always what she is now, I know that ; and I hope to find her better to-morrow, than she is to-day. And then, lastly, I am of the grand old Celtic race ; I come of those whom the Saxon never subdued, but who fought Enijland and freldnd, 7 and lived uiiiong tlie wild, weird scenes of Cornwall. My first consciousnesH was filled with the Hobhinj^ of winds, and the heat of the wild north sea-surf upon the rocks and brown sand, and I sometimes think that I took from the sea and the hold rocks some abiding sense of truthful- ness. And now let me turn from self-glorying to the story of Ireland. Of Pagan Ireland we have no authentic history — a thing not to be wondered at. With the introduction of Chris- tianity into Ireland began Irish history. It found that the original Celts had been con([uered by a colony of Milesians, who had divided the Island into five Kingdoms, Ulster, Leinster, Connaught, Munster, and Meath. These were again suljdivided into small Principalities, inhabited . by distinct se])ts, and each district was the common pro- perty of the entire sept. The distribution of land was in charge of the Tanist, or Toparch, who ruled. The cultivatf)rs had no right of property in the soil, but had a right to, land enough to live npon it somewhere. It was not feudal- ism, nor any thing akin to it. Christianity shed a great light over the land, and from it into other lands. But it adopted the word and form of the Eastern (h'eek Church, and not that of the Western Kornan Church. St. Pati'ick may have been there, and accomyjlished some of the things ascribed to him, but it is extremely doubtful. Believe it if you like — it won't hurt you. Whether St. Patrick came or not, it is certain that in the ninth century the Danes did, and destroyed all the national strength and glory. Then came Henry, the second English king of that name, armed with a Bull granted by Pope Hadrian for the conquest of Ireland and its due subjection to the Church of Rome. But Henry's eftbrts to conquer Ireland were few and feeble, and had Irishmen been true to Ireland 8 Lecture by Rev. A. J. Bray. It .-: l(f they would have vshaken off his gi'asp. But Dermod, King of Leinster, played it false, and for personal ends owned Henry's sovereignty. The English and Welsh went over with and after Strongbow — did some more or less success- ful fighting, and formed themselves into what was called the "English Pale." Two blunders. The first by the English : tliey did not conquer Ireland. The second In' the Irish : they did not drive the English into ihe sea. A decision would have been best for both parties and for all time. The English there *' were like a spear point embedded in a living body, inflaming all around, and disorganizing every vital function." In 1494 Henry VII. made a feel)le effort to force English rule and law upon Ireland, but it failed, and it was not until the reign of Henry VIII. that English authority became a reality in the land. Henry had a nund to rule in Ireland just as he ruled in England, and sent tiie unscrupulous Thomas Cromwell there to execute his will. The great house of Kildare tliought to frighten him by ])romoting a rising in 1534, under Lord Thomas Fitzgerald, but it followed the fashion of Irish revolts — they murdered the Archbishop of Dublin and harried the Pale, and then took to the bogs and forests of the border. Then Skeftington went with a train of artillery, battered down the great castles, cowed the Englishmen of the Pale and the Kerns of Wicklow and Wexford, and trampled the wild Celtic tribes into utter subjection. Henry was well disposed to rule Ireland by law, but he knew of no law except English law. It was nothing to him that the Irish were a people with settled ways, and a poetry and literature ; he thought only of making Ire- land English in manners, laws and language. A huge blunder, as I think, and the mother of untold miseries. Irish chiefs were transformed into English nobles, the lands of suppressed abbeys were grauted to them, and the Eng- England and Ireland. ^ lish L^ courts, taking no notice of the fact that by Irish custom, which was Irish law, the land belonged to the tribe at large, regarded the chiefs as sole proprietors of the soil, and gave them a title to the land. Ileligion had scarcely a form then. The church without the Pale was the same as the church within the Pale in doctrine and discipline, but the only intercourse was that induced by mutual hate. When Henry had wrought the Krst part of his programme for revolution in England, and had broken with Kome, the Irish bishups and chieftains accepted the change of headship without a word of protest, but when the ecclesiastical change in England had brought about a change in theology, and the Protestants wanted to impose their beliefs on the Irish, the Irish said : " No — deal with nam(\s and forms, and mere ecclesiasticism, if you will, l^ut when you come to lay rude hands on our faith we resist, and say it shall not be." And they did resist, and in resisting found that as Irishmen they had a common cause and com- mon foes ; that they were a people — and they clasped hands over the grave in which they had buried centuries of feud ; they found national identity in the identity of religion — those within the Pale became one with those without the Pale, and a nation was born of the union — it was Ireland. But it was a child of the storm, destined to be rocked and rent by many a wind. Mary took the throne of Eng- land, and tried to thrust the shadow backward on the dial. It gave Ireland religious peace, but just then, when Eng- lish law and industry were spreading in the South, and Munster was submitting to civilization, the Dublin Gov- ernment resumed the old idea of colonizing, and gave the whole county of the O'Connors to English settlers, calling: it King's and Queen's counties, in honor of Philip and!" Mary. This meant a savage warfare between the new settlers and the dispossessed Septs, which ended by-and-by 10 Lecture by Rev. A. J. Bray. r'f in the complete extermination of the Irish. To whom could the Irish look on the earth ? — religious enemies took away their religious liberty, and religious friends spoiled them of their lands. . , Under Elizabeth, Protestantism was forced on Ireland again, and the Irish, siding with the Pope, rose in revolt in 1580 — rose only to be defeated, and defeat meant further loss of land. In Munster more than 574,000 acres were taken from Irish owners and given to Englishmen ; and one condition of grant was that no Irish should be accepted as tenants by the new proprietors, the Irish could only remain as day laborers or ploughmen on the soil they had owned. A few were able to evade the law by submitting to rent and rack-rent — some more became day laborers, and more went off to the mountains to form that vagrant, homeless, half-savage tribe crushed into beggary and robbery and agrarian outrages by oppression, and afterward known as " Woodkerns," or " Rapparees," or " Tories." By a decision of the King's Bench, when James the first ruled England, the whole system of tanistry and gravel- kind, whicli had grown out of the Brehon law and was re- cognized over great part of Ireland, was declared illegal — which means that, without any sort or kind of compensa- tion to landlords, the proprietary rights of the natives were swept away. Then came the plantation of Ulster. Tyrone and Tryconnel accused of treason, tied, and six counties were confiscated and settled with English and Scotch. A \ ilarge Presbyterian element was introduced which tended to increase theological bitterness. The character of the new settlers was on the whole not for the making of ^^, peace; they were wild and evil, for the most part, hating '^ji^heir Irish neighbors, and taking no pains to hide that hate. But the Irish were a docile people, and bore the hardship meekly: had England begun to act justly then they ^J1 England and Ireland. 11 m would have become a peaceful and prosperous nation." They had gone through the horrors which had marked the suppression of the Irish under Elizabeth, — the confiscations in three Provinces — the abolition of the land customs which were dear to them all, — the legal condemnation of their religion, and the planting among them, on their own soil, of an alien and hostile race whose every act was cruelty ; but all this would have been lived through and down if this had been all — but all it was not, nor yet half of the whole. The English had conceived a desperate hunger for Irish lands. The trade of Discoverer was invented, — that is, that those who could find defective titles might possess them- selves of the estate. The English played a paying game of confiscation by legal quibble, and played it to the end. Every iniquity was perpetrated wliich was possible to men of an advanced civilization and a reformed religion. Charles I. was a mild-mannered man, — half a fool, but he would have been harmless if born to anything but the throne. Firmness and generosity were needed for the government of Ireland ; Charles was obstinate and unjust. He . took steps for increasing the army and religious animosity — he made promises and then broke them — guaranteed landlords in their rights, and then took their lands from them by a process of legal confiscation. Went- worth, who did some good in developing the material resources of the country, and the linen manufacture, wanted for the king a despotism in Ireland as in Eng- land. The clouds of threatening gathered blackness. The Puritan party in England was fost rising to power, inspired by a fierce hate of Popery. The rumor ran through Ireland that the Scotch Covenanters had resolved never to lay down arms until religion was uniform throughout the whole Kingdom. By the English Parliament Eoman Catholics were driven from the army — the King was asked i • 12 Lecture hy Rev. A. J. Bray. f to confiscate two-thirds of the lands of all Catholics ; seven priests were hung for celebrating mass, and it was declared in Parliament that the conversion of the Irish Papists could only be effected by the Bible and the sword. Petitions prayed for the extinction of Popery and Prelacy in Ireland. The Irish believed that the time for fighting had come. They were suffering under the sense of many wrongs — from the act of uniformity under Elizabeth to the confiscation of the Irish College under Charles. It seemed as if the troubles in England gave them a chance, and they took it, and rose in rebellion. I must tell the story of that rebellion briefly. You can see the causes which were at work to provoke that revolt. In Ulster the ruthless policy of confiscation was pushed on with vigour ; the Lords Justices sought to make war easy and a necessity, and peace hard, impossible. In Ulster it was agrarian grievance, but the gentry of Munster and Connaught remained loyal, and would have so remained had not the English Parliament first prorogued the Irish Parliament, thereby depriving them of their qne and only means for attesting their loyalty, and protecting their lives and property, and then passed a resolution to the effect that no toleration should be henceforth granted to the Catholic religion in Ireland. On the night of October 22nd, 1641, the Irish of Ulster rose up in mad revolt against the men who had been carrying on the work of " rooting out the Irish." Early in December all Ireland was ablaze with rebellion, — but out of Ulster it was a defensive religious war, entered into by men w^ho had a care for 'their conscience, and would make a demand for freedom. Let me say in passing, that I hate war with every fibre of my being. I have a horror of its horrors. I think not so much of the men dying as of the widows and orphans living. I think of the waste and w^oe it England and Ireland. 13 ^y means ; but there is something I hate more than I hate war, and that is the spoiling of men of their rights. The poor Irish ! It was an awful thing to rise like that and spoil and kill ! Yes, but this is not the first part of the chapter. This is the second act in the drama, coming naturally after the first. They were being hemmed in, — the fatal circle of English oppression was closing in upon them, — the hell- hounds of injustice were at their heels, — what then ? Should they die as men, fighting for men's rights to live and worship God according to their conscience ; or, like sheep worried to death by wild dogs ? Like men, say I, — like men, fighting. Under some circumstances revolt is glory, submission a crime. It may be, that if I had lived in those days, an Englishman, I should have made a clutch at the property of the Irish. I might have thought them fair game for plunder and killing. I cannot tell, but I am sure, I am certain, I know it by the blood that is in me, that if I had lived in those days, an Irishman, I should have risen in revolt, mad as the maddest at the cruel wrongs imposed. Popular history has it, and I believe a very general credence is given to the statement, that the Ulster rebellion began by a general and indiscriminate massacre of the Protestants, — resembling the massacre of the Danes by the English, the massacre of the French in the Sicilian Ves- pers, or of the Huguenots at St. Bartholomew. Clarendon declared that there were 40,000 or 50,000 of the English Protestants murdered before they suspected themselves to be in any danger, or could provide for their defence ; and other writers have said that the victims within the first two months were 150,000 or 200,000, or even 300,000. Now for many years I believed in the truth of those state- ments, and in public lectures I have justified the work of Cromwell in Ireland, somewhat at least, on that ground ■4 14 Lecture by Rev. A. J. Bray. \i U For this lecture I carefully sought the matter out, — an intelligent Irish gentleman helped me with books ; from other sources I got means for forming an unbiassed judg- ment. I need not tike you over all the musty ways I have had to travel, but as the result of it I have no hesi- tation whatever in saying, that while there were at the first outbreak, as is almost always the case in a great popular rising, some foul murders done, there was nothing whatever in the nature of a general and oi-ganized mas- sacre. The statements of sudden surprise and general massacre like the Sicilian vespers, or the Huguenots, are utterly untrue. In proof of that I could quote to you the records of the time, letters to the King, and a dozen other pieces of evidence. I am not saying that the Irish were mild-mannered over the war, — that they got up one bright morning and gave the English notice to quit, and lent them jewels and money and jaunting cars to go comfortably away, just as the Egyptians once upon a time said good-bye to the Israelites, glad to be rid of them — it was savage work done by savage men. In Ulster before the first week had elapsed the English were driven from their homes, and their expulsion was soon accompanied by hor- rible barbarities. The Scotch, who formed the majority of the Ulster Protestants, were at first unmolested, partly because the rebels feared to attack them, and partly because they hoped for a future alliance with them. But the English were utterly stripped. The weather was wild and cold, and all doors were closed against them, all food and shelter denied to them, and in multitudes they per- ished along the roads. Some singular acts of mercy were shown, —such as when O'Reilly the leader took 1500 people from Belturbet, and sent them with their goods under convoy to Dublin, — which convoy plundered them on the way ; and when capitulations were made and faithfuUy England anjbd Ireland. 15 kept, when castles were surrendered, — and when Bedell was allowed to receive and shelter poor Protestants, among others the rector of Belturbet, and all this took place in Ulster, where the horrible massacre was supposed to have been committed. The main character of the rebellion was plunder and not murder ; the chief object of the rebels was to expel the English from the houses and lands they had occupied. All the despatches to England s})(jke of plun- der, but none of them of wholesale murder. Of course most foul atrocities were committed. It was a popular and undisciplined rising of men in a very low stage of civilization, and years of cruel hardship had maddened them. You must expect ferocity in them — and they were ferocious. Eage and fear, all the motives of religious and agrarian animosity, were combined. The persecuted had turned upon their persecutors — the tiger was hunting the hunters, and that is always wild work. Murders occurred on a large scale, and with appalling frequency. Eighty persons were flung into the river from the bridge of Portadown ; as many, at least, at Oorbridge in the County of Armagh ; men and women who had shut them- selves up in houses for shelter and defence were burnt to ashes; whole families were killed at a time, and that by the score. Men were hanged, and women and children were drowmed by the hundred. The rebels seemed to remember the terrible days when Mountjoy and Carew ravaged the land, and left " not a horn or corn " remaining, and their parents had been starved to death by thousands. I need not dwell on this story, it must be known to you all. How that the outbreak was met by tenible reprisals, — how that English politics brought Ireland to the side of King Charles, signing a truce with him in 1643, and, by successive stages in 1646-48 and -49, completed a recon- ciliation between the great body of the Irish and Loyalists ; m Is i 16 Lecture by Rev. A. J. Bray. and how that Cromwell then swept down upon the poor doomed country, heating to earth rebel and royalist alike. It ought to be remembered, to his honour, that one of his first acts on going to Ireland was to prohibit the plunderings and outrages the soldiers had been accustomed to commit ; but nothing can atone for the terrible atrocities he com- mitted and permitted there. There is no blacker record in all history than the story of Cromwell in Ireland. He won and well deserved the eternal hate of all Irishmen, and I have never had the misfortune to meet an Englishman who had mind or heart or conscience to say one word in defence of the merciless barbarities he practiced there. If I had to speak of Cromwell and England I should do it with a proud, swelling heart ; I am proud of the great stand he made for the people's freedom ; I am proud of the way in which he broke the back of tyranny, and showed, by the resistless logic of sword and gun, that the only divine right kings have is to rule justly, and be true to the peo- ple's good. He laid the foundations of England^s freedom now, and made it grandly impossible for a tyrant to sit on that throne evermore ; but of Cromwell in Ireland I am ashamed — the man for the time was a fiend. The war was no war at all, it was a series of massacres. Mercy was asked, but no mercy was given — the word was passed to spare none. Drogheda was stormed, the soldiers surrendered; the officers were knocked on the head ; every tenth man of the soldiers was killed, the rest shipped for the Bar- badoes ; men and women were put to the sword when seek- ing protection in the sacred worship of a church. It is horrible to read of the assaulting and storming of Tredagh, where 3000, besides some women and children, were slain. It came to an end in 1652, and out of a population of 1,466,000, 616,000 had perished by the sword, by plague, or by famine artificially produced — 604,000 of them were England and Ireland. 17 Irish, and 112,000 were of English extraction. Liberty was given to abh)-bodied men to abandon the country and enlist in foreign service ; 40,000 of them went. Slave- dealers were let loose on the land, and hundreds of boys and girls, who had sinned against no government on earth, were torn away from home and friends, shipped to the Barbadoes, and sold to the planters. The Catholic religion was absolutely suppressed, and a priest could give consola- tion to a dying man only at the peril of his life. Then came the Crorawellian settlement, — the foundation of that deep and lasting division between the landlords and tlie tenants which is the cause of all the political and social troubles which waste Ireland and vex England to-day. All the land of three of the largest and richest provinces was confiscated and divided among adventurers and the Puritan soldiers whose pay was in arrears. In 1652 the Act of Settlement was passed ; all the great proprietors were declared by law to have forfeited life and lands; those who had accepted commissions were banished; all who had borne arms under the King's lieutenant forfeited two- thirds of their estates, and all who had not actually been in the service of the Puritan Parliament against the King, or had not done something to prove their affection for the Puritans, forfeited one-third of their estates. That was nearly as comprehensive as a policy of plunder could be, I think. There was a display of charity, however, for all those whose estates, real and personal, did not amount to ten pounds w^ere offered a free pardon. But the one-third of the estate to be restored to one class of offenders was not to be of their own old estate, but, as the Act runs, " in such places as Parliament, for the more effectual settlement of the peace of the nation, should think fit to appoint.'* And they thought fit to confine the Catholic landholders to Connaught and Clare, beyond the river Shannon, and B 18 Lecture hy Rev. A. J. Bray. divide Leinster, Munster and Ulster among Trotestant colonists. Commissioners were appointed to divide the land according to the claims of the adventurers and Puritan soldiers who gave the despoiled Irish until the 1st May, 1654, "to remove and transplant themselves" into their new homes across the Shannon. Martial law was estab- lished; no Catholic was permitted to reside within any garrison or market town, or to go a mile beyond his dwelling \without a passport ; every meeting of four persons, if not of oXie family, was illegal and treasonable ; to carry arms without a license, or have them in the house, was a capital offence ; and any transplanted Irishman found on the left bank of the Shannon could be legally shot by the first person who met him. It was decided not to give "the least allowance, or countenance, or toleration to the exercise of the Catholic religion in any manner whatsoever." By proclamation all Catholic clergymen were ordered to quit Ireland within twenty days, under the penalty of high treason ; to harbor a clergyman was to incur the penalty of death ; to know of one concealed and not declare it was to be liable to public whipping and the amputation of the two ears; to be absent for one Sunday from the parish church was to incur a fine of half a crown ; the magistrates were authorized to take away the children of Catholics and send them to England for education, and to tender the oath of abjuration to all persons of the age of one and twenty years, — the refusal to take the oath would subject them to imprisonment during pleasure, and to the forfeiture of two- thirds of their real and personal estates. Thus Ireland under Cromwell's Act of Settlement. Was I right in say- ing that, while he did mighty things for the good of Eng- land, he deserved and won the eternal hate of all Irishmen ? The Irish heart beat high and fast once more when Charles the Second ascended the throne of Endaud. His England and Ireland. 19 father, the first of that name as Engh'sh King, had pro- mised an "act of oblivion," which should cover all offences since the outbreak of rebellion, and the Second Charles had written from Breda early in 1650, that he intended to observe the engagements of his father. But there was a practical difficulty in the way. The transaction had taken place, — the land had passed into the actual possession of English settlers, — they had got the right to it by Act of Parliament, and it was in payment of loans or service. The Irish could easily overlook all this, but for Charles it was not so easy. A wrong is more easily done than undone. The agents of the Irish Catholics proposed that Parliament should pass an Act of Indemnity, and that the Irish should be restored to their estates, but that a third part of the produce of the estates should be applied for a term of years to the satisfying of those adventurers and soldiers who had valid claims, and that a Parliament should be called in Dublin to raise a revenue for the Crown. But English ideas opposed that. The English were still smart- ing under a sense of wrong and revenge for that supposed massacre at the outbreak of the rebellion, — which was fully believed in England, and which gave such horrible ferocity to CromwelPs temper, and they still remembered the blood and money spent in putting that rebellion down. More than that, it was easily seen that the sum i>roposed to be raised would not compensate the adventurers and soldiers who had received land instead of money, so the proposals were rejected. The Irish could only get their estates by holding them on the old tenure, and that meant that the King would lose the quit rents paid by the adventurers and soldiers, — £60,000 per year, no small amount even for a King in those days. So a co:npromise was adopted, and a declaration was issued which became the basis of the first Act of Settlement. Charles confirmed to i 20 Lecture by Rev, A, J, Bray. tho adventurers all land possessed by them on May 7tli, 1659. He also confirmed, with a few specified exceptions, the lands allotted to soldiers instead of pay, and provided that officers who had served before June 5th, 1649, and had not yet received lands, should receive them to the value of rather more than half the amount due to them. Protestants were made exceptional, and any estates of theirs which had been given to adventurers or soldiers were to be restored unless they had been in rebellion before the cessation. Then the " innocent Papists " were dealt with. These comprised those who had at no time identified them- selves with the Papal party, even in defence of their religion : and then came measures for those who had been in the rebellion, but had submitted and adhered to the peace of 1648. If they had stayed at home and accepted lands in Connaught, they were to be held to the bargain ; but if they had served under His Majesty abroad, and had demanded no compensation for their former estates, they were to be restored, but this restitution was to be postponed until reprisals had been made for the adventurers and soldiers who got possession of their estates. Thirty-six persons were able to avail them- selves at once of this special act of grace. If I had been offering criticism here instead of merely giving an his- torical outline of the times, I should say we must not hastily and too severely condemn the British Govern- ment. Many conflicting claims and bitterly hostile interests had to be dealt with : the king and his ministers were not free to follow the bent of their own mind ; previous legislation had created difficulties, and it is always easier to do a wrong than to undo it again. Charles II. made a more or less honest effort to be just toward Ireland, but to be absolutely just was hard, if not impossible. When # England and Ireland. 21 a Parliament was summoned in Ireland the political in- fluence of the adventurers was so great that they returned an overwhelming majority in the House of Commons ; the Ciiiholics had scarcely a show of representation. Then there w^a ^his difficulty, — there was not sufficient av. 'liable land to batisfy all parties. The Duke of Ormond, who v^jis ruler there when Charles ascended the throne, and to whofn vast grants of land were given, wrote : " If the adventurers and soldiers must be satisfied to the ex- tent of what they supposed was intended them by the decla- ration, and if all that adhered to the peace in 1648 be restored, as the same declaration seems also to intend, there must be new discoveries made of a new Ireland, for the old will not serve to satisfy all these engagements. It remains then to determine which party must suffer ir» the default of means to satisfy all." That was the trouble If the area of Ireland could have been increased by Act of Parliit- ment, I do not mean to say that the adventurers could have been satisfied, but at least the problem would have been easier of solution. Charles had no desire to root out the Irish, and neither could he root out the Protestants whom Cromwell had planted there. They had already obtained a firm grasp upon the soil ; they were a strong, compact, and well-armed body of men, able and willing to defend their position ; they were in actual possession, while the Irish dispossessed were broken, poor and miserable. It is always easy to discredit the poor and the friendless, and there were plenty of people willing and ready to circulate reports to their discredit. There were rumors of plots and crimes invented by the adventurers, and spread by their paid agents in England, where they were quite readily believed. The Irish were as unskilful as they were un- fortunate, and always seemed to be hurting their own cause. English public opinion was against them; they 22 Lecture by Rev. A. J, Bray. 1 1 I quarrelled with the only man who had the power to help them, the Diike of Ormond. No wonder, then, that the king sided with public opinion and power. He declared that he had intended to give the Irish all that was pro- mised by the peace in 1648, but he promised it under the idea that there were plenty of lands for the adventurers and soldiers to be dispossessed for restorable persons, but he considered the settlement of Ireland as an affair rather of policy than of justice, and he thought it for the good of his crown and Government that the loss should fall on the Irish. The English Parliament argued in the same way. and the Irish were sacrificed with small reluctance. The articles of the peace of 1648 were simply abandoned, but a Court of English Commissioners was appointed to hear the claims of innocent Papists. Four thousand innocents came forward, and began to establish their claims ; 600 were heard, and nearly all of them made good their case, and a panic broke out among the English settlers. They saw that tliere were sufficient innocents to eat up all the Government had to give; the Parliament entered a protest; there was threat of a great Protestant insurrection in Ireland ; the public opinion of England was hostile to any concessions to the Catholics, the Commis- sioners were recalled, and an Act of Seotlement was passed which disposed of the question for the time. The Act provided that the adventurers and soldiers should give up one-third of their grants, to be used for increasing the reprisals fund ; that Connaught purchasers were to retain two-thirds of the land they held lu Se, timber, 1663; that in aU cases of competition between the Catholics and the Protestants, every ambiguity should be i iterpreted in favour of the Protestants ; that twenty more of the Irish should be restored by special fr vour, but that all the other Oath )lics whose claims, for want of time, had not been attended to England and Ireland. 23 red )ro- the ers but ler of the by the Commisgioners, should be treated as disqualified. By that Act of Settlement more than 3,000 old proprie- tors were driven from the inheritance of their fathers, without even the show of a trial. Previous to 1641 the Irish owned two-thirds of the good land in Ireland ; after the Act of Settlement the Protestants owned that two- thirds. It was settlement, settlement with a vengeance, for the poor Irish ! And yet the years that followed the Act were marked by peace and prosperity. The old Celtic race in the Green Island was making a magnificent push to live somehow. But Ireland was doomed. Charles II. died in 1685, and liis brother James, the Duke of York, reigned in his stead. James was the least wise of all the Stuart rulers ; he was a man of less than mediocre ability, a Catholic, and bitterly a bigot. His dull, narrow mind could contain but one idea, and that was the re-establishment of Catholicism in England. He hated Parliaments, and had a profound belief in royal authority. England and Scotland were by this time bigoted in Protestantism ; they identified Catholicism with star chambers, royal tyranny, and a hundred other evils — James with a lofty unconcern for that, wrought for the Catholics. He gave them commissions in the army and civil appointments, but, by maintaining the law as to church and state held the people in loyalty for a time. In the Monmouth rising that loyalty showed itself — but when he struck hands with Louis of France, the Catholic bigoted as himself, he turned the heart of the people from him. He defied the Test Act, filled the army with Catholic officers, and the streets of London with Catholic priests, and dashed himself with mad impatience against every form of English liberty. He ordered the Scotch to legalize the toleration of Catholics, — offered them free trade with Eng- land as a bribe, — ^but they were not to be bribed, and gave 24 Lecture hy Rev. A. J. Bray. the king for answer — no. " Shall we sell our God ? " His efforts to repeal the Test Act were fruitless, — the people would not have it so. But the trouble in England was joy in Ireland. William of Orange landed in England on the 5th of November, 1688, and on the 12th of the follow- ing March, James, after a sojourn in France, landed at Kinsale. He at once issued a proclamation summoning all Irish absentees to return and help their king, — another proclamation called a Parliament for May 7th. It was unlike the last Parliament, for many of the Protestant land- lords had joined the Prince of Orange, or fled to England. The Parliament was almost wholly Catholic. They met without experience in public business, but with the memory of most bitter wrongs. Many of them were the sons of the three thousand, w ho, without trial or compensa- tion, had been deprived of their estates by the Act of Settle- ment. There was scarcely a man in the Parliament who had not been injured in his fortunes or his family by the confiscations of Ulster, the frauds of Strafford, and the long train of calamities which followed. It requires no stretch of the imagination to understand that such men, called to form a Parliament at such a time, placed where they could be masters of their old masters, should have acted with violence and small regard for vested interests. But they began well, by passing an Act securing religious freedom to everybody in all parts of Ireland. They were far ahead of their king. The next Act repealed Poyning's law, and declared the legislative independence of Ireland, — a position I for one wish they could have maintained ; and they would have maintained it if by another Act they could have swung the Green Island a thousand miles to a. But the third measure was of another sort, it abol- l^iied the payments to Protestant clergy in corporate tv'vns; and a fourth enacted that the Catholics throughout Ireh cal c fore. com] were any testj tice, Idc Iris England and Ireland. 25 Ireland should henceforth pay their tithes and ecclesiasti- cal dues to their own clergv and not to Protestants as he- fore. It was spoliation of course, but the principle of compensation was not known in those days, and the Irish were the last people in the world likely to learn it from any lessons the English could give. But the spoliated Pro- testant clergy were guarant ed full liberty to profess, prac- tice, and teach their religion. And I want to say here that I do not find religious persecution as an element in the Irish nature. It is tolerant, and not given to bigotry. I give no " taffy to the Irish," but only speak truth as I get it from history, when I say that at no time and under no circumstances have the Irish shown a bigotry and intoler- ance to equal that of the early Puritans. But to return to the Irish Parliament : having S( mewhat spoiled the Protestant clergy it passed Acts for encouraging strangers to settle in Ireland, — for the relief of distressed debtors, — for the recovery of waste lands, — for the improvement of trade, shipping and navigation, and for establishing free schools. All going to prove, you must allow, that the Irish had an idea as to how to govern themselves if they might but have the chance. But, unfortunately, the A cts I have named did not end the law-making. They were resolved that the descendants of the old proprietors should be re-established in their lands : holding that the outbreak of 1641 had been due to the intolerable oppression and cruelties of the Lords Justices and the Puritan party; that the Catholics of Ireland before the struggle ended were fully reconciled to the king, and had received from him a full and formal pardon, with a royal pledge that their property should be restored, which pledge had been broken ; and holding that the t went' -.^oiir years which had elapsed since the Act was passed i;a. nat • "d could not annul the rights of the old I ^6 Lecture hy Rev. A. J. Bray. I proprietors or their descendants ; — holding those things, they repealed the Act of Settlement and explanati'm, and enacted that the heirs of all persons who had landed pro- perty in Ireland on October 22nd, 1641, and who had been deprived of their rights by the Act of Settlement should enter at once into their properties. The persons to be dispossessed were of two kinds, some were the adven- turers or soldiers of Cromwell, and they were to be sent empty away — the fact that they had obtained land for money lent to the Government or due as pay — that they had improved the property and put up buildings on it, was not taken into consideration. Tt was an absolute dismissal. The other class consisted of those who had come to the land by fair purchase of those who held it by Act of Parliament, and the Irish legislators maintained that those persons were entitled to full compensation. The terms of the Act read ; that whereas certain persons have come into possession after the Act of Settlement, "for good and valuable consideration, and not considerations of blood, afi&nity or marriage, declares that these persons are hereby intended to be reprised for such their purchases, in the manner hereafter to be expressed." But the question came, how and from whence compensation was to be got ? The Irish borrowed the English idea. From the days of Mary to the Act of Settlement confiscations of Irish lands were accounted for by some real or pretended treason, and, following the example, the Irish Legislators passed an Act declaring that the real estates of all Irish proprietors who dwelt in any part of the three kingdoms which did not acknowledge King James, or who aided, abetted, or corresponded with the rebels, were forfeited and vested in the Crown. Out of these lands they proposed to compensate the purchasers under the Act of Settlement. Taking high moral ground, we are bound to say that one wrong cannot Eiigland and Ireland. 27 justify a second, and so this was unjust ; but, judging in the light of previous events in Ireland, if I were an Irishman I should not be ashamed of that Act. But the next measure passed no Irishman could, or ever will, glory in — it was the Act of Attainder. A list was made out, containing more than 2,000 names of landlords to be attainted of high treason. They were grouped. The first group consisted of those who were said to be actively engaged in rebellion against the King, and were to become liable to all the penalties attaching to high treason, unless they gave themselves up for trial before the tenth of August. The next group consisted of those who had left the country after November 5, 1688, and they were allowed until September 1st to justify themselves. A third group consisted of those who had left Ireland and wfere living in England or Scotland, — and then the Act went on to say that those absent from Ireland from any cause should have tiieir lands provisionally vested in the King. The tyranny of the Act is obvious. It threw the burden of proof upon the accused instead of uyjon the accuser. And many were spoiled of their lands for no other crime than living out of Irel md in a time of civil war. Many were attainted by mere common fame, and there is no sufficient reason for doubt- ing the statement made, that the lists of attainted persons were not published until after the period of grace had ex- pired. All the excuse to be offered for it is that the Act was passed in a time of panic. The legislators were in- experienced, and King James was in desperate straits for money to carry on the war. It was the blot on the Irish Parliament, but not much worse in character or execution than an Act of Attainder introduced into the English Par- liament on the 20th of June, 168 *. James found in Ireland an army of 50,000 men, with Tyrconnel at their head, and with these he hoped to meet 'f ^ h«5i ' 28 Lecture hy Rev. A. J. Bray. and master William of Orange. But the King was coin- l)elled to front a difficulty : with him it was war against William and Protestantism ; with the Irish it was a war of races — a supreme struggle for their ancient rights in law and land. They wanted Ireland for the Irish, and the first step in such a policy was to drive out the Englishmen who still stood at bay in Ulster. James wanted no such strife, but it was forced upon him. Half of Tyrconnel's army of fifty thousand was sent against Londonderry, where seven thousand Englishmen, behind a weak wall, manned by a few old guns, and destitute of even a ditch, made olorious warfare of resistance. James made offers, which were firmly rejected. The people died of hunger in the streets, and of the fever which comes of hunger, but still the cry of " no surrender " rang from the lips of those heroes of battle. A hundred and five days it had lasted, and only two days food remained to the besieged when an English gun broke the boom across the river, and an- nounced that help was at hand. The besiegers withdrew, and the men of Enniskillen rushed from behind their walls, and struggled through a bog to attack a force double their number at Ne V o An Butler, and drive it back to Dublin in a panic. James was in a worse panic than any depressed soldier of his beaten army, and he looked upon his game as hopeless. But the Irish were ardent and hopeful. The Count of Lauzun came to help him with 7,000 picked soldiers from France, and on the last day of June the Irish army with James at its head, and the English army under William faced each other. James had an army of about 20,000 men strongly posted behind the Boyne ; William had a much larger force. " I am glad to see yoa, gentlemen," William cried ; " if you escape me now, the fault will be mine." Early next morning the English army plunged into the river. The Irish Foot, who at first fought England and Ireland. well, broke into a sudden panic when tin passage of the river was effected, but the Horse made so firm a stand that for a time it held the English centre in complete check, but William came with his left wing, and all was over. The dull-minded James was a coward, a poltroon ; had he let the Irish alone the defeat would have been far less sure — he interfered, fool that he was, and then, in despair, fled away to France, coward tliat he was. " Change Kings with us," said an Irish ofiicer to an P^nglishman, who had taunted him with the panic, " change Kings with us, and we will fight you again," and they v/ould have done ; and since then, no Englishman of sense and courage will sneer at an Irish soldier. James had gone, but the brave Irish made one more stand in the following Spring, and then were beaten and broken utterly. Ireland was broken utterly. In the war of races she had been conquered. Limerick alone was left defiant for a time, but e\en Limerick had to surrender. Two treaties were drawn up between the English and Irish generals. By the first it was stipulated that the Catholics of Ireland should enjoy such privileges in the exercise of their religion as were consis- tent with law, or as they had enjoyed t)iem during the reign of Charles the Second. But I must remind my friends who make complaint that this treaty was not kept, that the generals were not competent to make such treat}^ binding — they could only engage to do their best to have it ratified by Parliament. They did their best, and failed. Parliament was not in the humor to ratify such a liberal and reason- able treaty. Ten thousand men chose exile to life in a land where all hope of national freedom was gone, and when the wild cry of the women, who stood watching them go, was hushed, the silence of death settled down upon Ireland. There was peace — it was the peace of despair ! No English- man who loves, and is proud of what is noble and good in »l 30 Lecture hy Rev. A. J. Bray. I'li the English temper, can tell without sorrow and shame the story of that time of evil oppression and guilt. I want no dealings with the man who can glorify, or even excuse, what was done. The most terrible legal tyranny under which a nation has ever groaned avenged the rising under Tyr- connel. The people became, as Swift said, in bitter words, *' hewers of wood and drawers of water " to their con- querors. " h ewers of wood and drawers of water," indeed —as veritable slaves as ever were whipped by tyrant masters. Alter the refusal of William to accept the treaty of Limerick, — which would have given the Catholics some legal right to life and religion, an Act was passed to pre- vent Protestants from inter-marrying with Papists ; and yet another to prevent Papists from being solicitors. (I am using the language of the days I am speaking of in my use of words, so my Catholic friends must not imagine that I do it without care for their feelings when I use the words Romish and Papist.) A clause was inserted in the last Act I have named prohibiting Papists from being employed as gamekeepers. I have read the Act, and could nowhere nd the connection between solicitors and gamekeepers, but I satisfy myself by reflecting that when men are doing dirty work they cannot afford to be nice about it. On the 4th of March, 1704, Anne being Queen of England, the royal assent was given to an Act to prevent the further growth of Popery. It really should have read " An Act to abolish Popery," for that was the end contemplated. By the third clause of the Act a Popish father being a landowner, no matter whether he acquired it by inheritance or by purchase, was deprived of the power to sell, mortgage, or otherwise dispose of it, or to leave portions or legacies out of it, if one of his sons became Protestant. That is to say, the moment a son became Pro- England and Ireland. 31 testant the father's proprietary rights were changed and infringed. By the fourth clause the Popish father was debarred, under a penalty of £500, from being a guardian to, or having the custody of, his own children ; but if the child, at any age, should declare itself a Protestant, it was to be taken from its father and put into the charge of a Protestant relation. The 5th clause provided that no Pro- testant should maiTy a Papist, in or out of the kingdom, if the Papist possessed land in Ireland. The sixth clause rendered Papists incapable of purchasing any manors, tene- ments, hereditaments, or any rents or profits arising out of the same, or of holding any lease of lives, or other lease whatever for any term exceeding thirty-one years. And further, that if a farm produced a profit greater than one- third of the rent, the right in it was immediately to cease, and the whole would pass over to the first Protestant who should discover the rate of profit. By he tenth clause, the estate of a Papist, for want of a Protestant heir, was ta be divided, share and share alike, among all his sons ; for want of sons, among all his daughters ; and for want of daughters, among all the collateral kindred of the father. A very good law, let me say, — very good if applied all round to Protestants as well as Catholics, and to England as well as to Ireland. Had the law of primogeniture been abolished thcLi' there would be less ugly questions to settle now. But to legislate that way for one class of people, scattering their lands, while another was allowed to concentrate, was not good, it was ferocious, it was diabolical. By the six- teenth clause aU persons taking ofdce, civil or military, were required to take and subscribe the oath of supremacy, and also an oath abjuring the Catholic religion. The twenty-third clause provided that no Papist should dwell in Limerick or Galway. The twenty-fourth provided that no persons should vote at elections without taking the "I«- • . ■ > t! f,l • ^ 32 Lecture by Rev. A. J. Bray. oath of allegiance to the Crown, and abjuration of theff faith ; and the twenty-fifth that all advowsons possessed by Papists should be vested in Her Majesty. I have given you the clauses as they were enacted, so that you may see exactly what was done, and not have to rely on any mere wt rd or comment of mine. The object is plain to us now, as it was plain to the Catholics then. Tliey protested to the English Parliament, and made piteous appeal to the Irish Parliament ; they prayed for the Treaty of Limerick ; but protests, appeals and prayers were wasted, for the En,; lish had a mind to stamp out Popery. Protestantism was showing how much better and kinder and liker to Christ it was by a peculiar manner of legalizing robbery and persecution. But that was not all, nor enough. In 1709 another Act was passed to explain and amend the Act to prevent the further growth of Popery. The third clause of it provided that in case of a child of Popish parents declaring itself a Protestant, the High Court of Chancery should have power and authority to compel the father under oath to make clear the value of all his property, personal or real, and the Court should give an order for the father to pay for the support of the child, according to the judg- ment of said Court. The twelfth clause provided that all servants in public employment — members of Parliament, barristers, or officers of any court of law — should educate their children Protestants. The sixteenth clause provided that a Papist teaching school publicly or in a private house, or as usher to a Protestant family, should be deemed and persecuted as a Popish regular convict. The 1 8th clause provided that Popish priests who might turn Protestant should receive £30 per annum. The twentieth clause dealt with the remunerations to be given for finding and denouncing Popish clergy and school- ■;■ 1 England ar Ireland. 33 masters; for discovering an aiv ibisKop, b'shop, vicar-gen- eral, or other person exercising loreign urisdiction, £50 ; for discovering a regular or secular clergyman not regis- tered, £20; for discovering each Popish sch( xiiaster >r usher, £10. The thirtieth clause provided that aiy Papist, being tried under this x\ct should be tried by Pro- testants. The 37th clause provided that no Papist in trade, except the linen trade, should take more than two apprentices. Then followed an Act to prevent Popish clergy from entering the kingdom ; another for registering Popish clergy, and prohibiting them from employing curates. These are the penal laws, and penal enough they were, God knows. No more atrocious business was ever transacted within the pale of civilization. The effect of all this degrading persecution may be guessed at. The people saw their chapels shut up, their priests hunted out of the land or brutally murdered ; they saw religion and law thrown into violent antagonism ; they learnt to regard law as their natural enemy. In England law and religion were on the same side — law supported religion, and religion sanctioned law ; so the people learnt to unite these two great forces in their own mind, and the magistrate was a man of double authority wher he happened to be a clergyman. But the Irish had no such teaching. To them the law was an enemy, opposed to their religion, opposed to their just rights in lands and trade, the enemy of the family, of the nation, bent only on confiscation and persecution. It is a horrible thing to teach any people that lesson; it is subversive of all a people's best interests, it is worse than barbarism, and when a people have once learnt that they won't soon unlearn it again. When you laugh at the Irishman because he is not sure of his vote, but is sure that it wiU be " agin the Government," remember that it was in his blood at his 34 Lecture hy Rev. A, J. Bray. birth, — it camo to him as a heritage. It was rubbed into the Irish nature by the penal code, and it is hardly to bo wondered at that ho is slow in believing that law and religion are united at last. The influence of those laws as they related to property was hardly less disastrous. There are writers who insist upon it that the code was a dead letter. The Irish did not find it so. In trade they had many disabilities and illegal exactions. Dr. Nary wrote in 1724: — "At present there is not one free nlan, or master of any corporation, nor of any other of the least charge, bating that of a petty con- stable, of the Roman Catholic religion in all the kingdom ; neither are any of the tradesmen or shopkeepers of this religion suffered to work at their respective trades, or sell their goods in any. of the cities of Ireland, except they pay exorbitant taxes, which they call quarterage, to the respec- tive masters of their corporations." In many parts of Ireland the most lucrative trades were long a strict mono- poly of Protestants, who refused to admit any Catholic as an apprentice. But the condition of the landowner was far worse. I read to you the clause providing for dis- coverers and their reward. The supply was soon forth- coming. A whole profession of spies and informers was called into being, and so well did they succeed that in 1739, a writer said that in all Ireland there were not twenty Papists who had £1000 in land. A Protestant gentry grew up regarding ascendency as their inalienable right, proudly and ostentatiously indifferent to the interests of the masses of the people, and carefully preserving social distinctions. A Catholic could not carry the arms which were considered the signs of a gentlemanly position with- out a license, which was often difficult to get, and he only kept his hunter or his carriage horses by the forbearance of his Protestant neighbour. A story is told of a Catholic England and Ireland. 35 into o bo and j,'entleman who once drove into MuUingar at the time of the assizes in a carriage drawn by two beautiful horses. A man 8topf)ed the carriage, and tendering ten guineas claimed the horses for his own. The gentleman drew a brace of pistols from his pocket and shot the horses dead upon the sjiot. The man who tendered the money was acting according to law. And then we must not forget that behind all this lay the important fact that most of the land of the country was lield by the title of recent confiscation, and that the old j)OSsessors or their children were living before their eyes in poverty, in wretchedness, in serai-slavery, but by the people still remembered, and honoured, and sympathized with. The cruel enactments of the penal code were due to the fact that those holding the property felt that their position was insecure. And this made it 'impossible that political movements in Ireland should have a national character. This made the landlords, as a class, reckless, arrogant and extravagant, and this made them bitterly hostile to every scheme for ameliorating the condition of the Catholics. Yon see the picture, and do you wonder at the way things have worked ? I do not. Why is Ireland unlike Scotland or England ? Do you not see ? In Scotland the greater part of the land is held, even now, b/ the descendants of chiefs, whose origin fades away in the twilight of fable. In England, although there have been great fluctuations and changes, much of the land is still owned by families which rose to power under the Tudors or even the Plantagenets. In Scotland and England centuries of co-operation, of sympathy, and of mutual good service, have united landlord and tenant by closest ties. The close sympathy between the Scotch people and the Scotch gentry has been one great cause of that admirable firmness of character and manly independence which . i '"^n ! 1 36 Lecture hy Rev. A. J. Bray. characterize the Scotch. But in Ireland, where the pitiful absence of industrial life marks out the landlords as being the natural leaders of the people, this sympathy has been almost entirely wanting. Instead of sympathy there was hostility. The division of classes and the war between them was begun by confiscation, perpetuated by religion, and aggravated by law. Nothing so consolidates a people as the sense that in time of struggle or difficulty, they will find their natural leaders at their head — men in whom they can trust, whose interests are identical with their own. But in Ireland there was no such sense, there could be no such sense. The men to whom they should have been able to look as leaders were their actual enemies by avowal and practice. This told with degrading power upon every part of their national life; it hindered their progress politically, educationally, and in all that concerns a nation. It made it impossible for a man to have a prosperous career open to him unless he first apostatized ; 60 that he had to commence by first degrading himself — for I hold that it is a degradation for a man to change his religion unless he does it inteUectually and with pious motive only. We can only understand the present con- dition of Ireland by keeping in mind this fact that, while "in Scotland and England the people and the landlords were drawn together by co-operation, religion and law, in, Ireland they were separated by every conceivable differ- ence. The landlords were a caste, and dominant, separated from their tenants by privilege, by race, by religion, hy law by the memory of inexpiable wrongs, and by the actual and daily administration of justice, which was entirely under the control of the landlords. They grew even more lordly in their bearing, — their will was law ; and the people grew ever more submissive. The landlords were reckless of life and morals. Ireland was made a very by- word England and Ireland. 37 )itiful being been e was ween igion, )eople y will they own. be no been and proverb for its profligacy. There was everything done to hinder public improvement, nothing whatever to help it. The English had made an effort, and succeeded in stamping out Irish industry. A Navigation Act excluded her from the colonial market. She was prohibited from exporting cattle. Manufacture began to increase — an industrial enthusiasm arose in the land, — English and Scotch went over, — thousands were employed in the manu- facture of woollen, and it seemed as if Ireland would become an industrial nation. But England had not learnt the great gospel of generosity and free trade : a woollen manufacture sprang up in England ; English manufacturers, wanting a fair field and plenty of favour, petitioned for the total suppression of the rising industry in Ireland. The petition was heard and the National Policy adopted. By the Act of a Parliament summoned in Dublin, 1698, the industry of Ireland was utterly des- troyed. The Irish were forbidden to export their woollen manufactures to any country whatever, and their raw wool to any country except England. Poverty was the result, of course, poverty and wi'etchedness. Three famines in twenty years, and the people dying by thousands. Most sickening sights to be seen, — dead bodies in the fields eaten by dogs, — children dying on dung heaps, — 'babes sucking at the cold breasts . f dead mothers. There was no poor law, and not much public charit}*^; there was nothing but oppression, and I do not want to linger upon the revolting story. • It has often been asked why the Irish have been so utterly bek.nd all nations in the matter of education, and the answer i^-a s'mple — because education was denied to them. It is true that a law was passed under Henry VIII. compelling every clergyman to have a school in his parish ; but it soon became a dead letter, as we have seen. 38 Lecture hy Rev. A. J. Bray. Catholics were excluded, by the penal code, from the educational institutions of the country, and Catholic edu<}a- tion was forbidden. The law had it as a main object to keep in brutal ignorance about four-fifths of the people, unless tliey availed themselves of the Charter Schools, which were originated by March and afterwards adopted by Primate Boulter in 1733. The object of the schools was thus declared : " to rescue the souls of thousands of poor children from the dangers of Popish superstition and idolatry, and their bodies from the miseries of idleness and beggary." The idea was broad, as you see. And it was cleverly conceived. For there was no legal provision for the relief of the poor, and a bad season would bring on a famine. The Society proposed to take the half-starved children from the Catholic parents between^the ages of six and ten, to feed and clothe,* lodge and educate gratuitously, ' and to apprentice the boys and provide for the girls. But the one condition was that they should be educated as Protestants. When it was found that parents would sometimes place their starving children there for a time and then withdraw them when the pinch was over, a law was passed providing that, once the children had been placed in the schools, the parents lost all control over them, and could not withdraw them. The same law provided that the officers of the Society were empowered to take any children between the ages of five and twelve who were found begging and educate them as Protestants. Mr. Froude in that peculiarly inaccurate book, " The Eng- lish in Ireland," has said that " the Charter Schools were the best conceived educational institutions which existed in the world." Had the schools offered an education, an industrial education, I could adopt Mr. Fronde's language; but when I see that it only proposed to do that by inter- fering with the people's religious convictions and domestic England and Ireland. 39 happiness, I cannot adopt the language. The parental instinct was strong in Irish as in English breasts ; and it is a cruelty to place before people the dreadful choice of seeing their children brought up in dirt and hunger and misery to drag out a wretched existence, or to lose them altogether that they may be educated and cared for and taught to despise their parents* religion. Had the Society gone to work in the name of God and humanity, and not bigotry, Ireland would have had a different history than that she now reads through hot bUnding tears. I want to dwell a Uttle now on the landlords and their tenants. I have spoken of the hostility which existed and its causes ; now look at the effects. You will call to mind how much was done in England and Ireland by the co-operation of landlord and tenant. But Ireland had only a little of that. — absenteeism meant that at least one-third of the rent of the country was spent in England. Very many of the tenants never saw their landlords, and only thought of them as high-handed robbers. Intercourse might have softened that down, but instead of that the middleman came to make everything worse. The landlord, not liking the trouble of collecting his rents from the many tenants he had in whose interest he had no concern, let his land on a long lease to a large tenant, who paid the rent to the landlord, and made a profit for himself by sub- letting, and who undertook the work of managing the estate. This put the control of the tenants into the hands of an inferior class of persons, who were necessarily Protestant, but had none of that culture which tones down the asperities of religious differences. Very often the middleman became in turn an absentee, sublet his tenacy at an increased rent, and put other masters in to live upon the already over-rented tenants. As might be expected, the poor sank into the condition 40 Lecture hy Rev. A. /. Bray. of "cottiers," a specific and almost unique product of Irish industrial life. They had no permanent interest in the soil. The English farmer was a capitalist, who selected farming as one of the ways open to him to make a living ; not so the Irish farmer, he had neither money nor know- ledge, and found only the land between himself and starvation. Of course, rents were regulated by competi- tion, but it was the competition of a half-starved people who in desperation of hunger would promise anything. Swift said : " It is the usual practice of an Irish tenant, rather than want land, to offer more than he knoweth he can ever be able to pay ; and in that case he groweth desperate and payeth nothing." The landlords did nothing at all for the tenants. They had to build their own mud hovels, plant their hedges, and dig their ditches. They were half naked, half starved, and wholly ignorant. They had to pay rack rents to the middlemen, tithes to the clergy of the church they never attended, but hated, and dues to their own Priests. The land in many parts was rich and fertile, but they were never farmed ; each poor wretch as he got a few acres was only anxious lo get all he could out of the soil, and spend nothing upon it. He couldn't build a decent house if he would, and he wouldn't if he could, for it would mean more rent to pay. Ireland had aU the possibihties of a prosperous, even a wealthy country, they were killed by British legislation. The trade was restricted and finally destroyed, and agriculture was depressed by hard masters and middlemen. But, thank God, * change in the English Government of Ireland was introduced. A gleam of light, shot athwart the darkened sky; it was Ireland's time of morning. The great and brilliant Chatham was at the head of the English Government. The marvellous eloquence of Edmund Burke had convinced the head and heart of England that England and Ireland. 41 Jt of 3t in jcted ring; >ple, ling. Irishmen had a right to religious liberty; and in 1778 an Act was passed for " the relief of His Majesty's subjects professing the Popish religion." This \/as at least a good beginning, for the religious intolerance of the Protestants had filled the Irish mind with wild bitterness. But this Act went further than merely relaxing the ferocious laws of Queen Anne, it provided that they might take land on a lease not exceeding 999 years, or determinable upon any number of lives not exceeding five. The lands of Papists were made descendable, devisable or transferable, as fully as any of His Majesty's subjects. Papists were able to hold and enjoy all cstr.tes which might descend, be devised or transferred to them. The iniquitous law which altered a Catholic parent's estate if his eldest son conformed was abolished. In the year 1782 another Act was past for the further relief of His Majesty's subjects professing the Popish reli- gion. By it they might purchase lands or take interest therein, except advowsons and boroughs returning members to Parliament. A great many other old cruel disabilities were by the same Act wiped out. The Catholic clergy were relieved of their penalties, and another Act was passed to allow persons professing the Popish religion to teach school. But all this was only tinkering matters a little, it was a start in the right direction, but the work was not boldly done, and there was no definite aim. England might have recognised Ireland as a free nationality, and bound it to herself by federal ties, or she might have absorbed it as she absorbed Scotland ; but she did neither — she had neither a national nor an Imperial policy. With perverse ingenuity the worst features of both were adopted. I have spoken of the Acts which gave toleration to the Irish in all matters of education, worship, and dealing with lands, but still the native Catholics were in all social and 42 Lecture hy Rev. A. J. Bray. political matters, as of old, " hewers of wood and drawers of water" for Protestant masters, who looked on themselves as mere settlers, and would resent as an insult being called Irishmen. The Parliament was no real Parliament at all. Administration and justice were in the hands of members of the Established Church, a body comprising about one- twelfth of the population. Three nobles returned sixty members to the House of Commons. Politics were only a means for public plunder, and the means were used with no sign of stint or compunction. But trouble came to England, offering Ireland a chance. There was an effort made to implant British tyranny on the Continent of America, but the soil was against it, and it died. During the revolt of New England, when Old England was unduly alarmed by the bold stand of its colonists, and a threat of invasion from France, it called on Ireland to make provi- sion for its own defence. The answer was forty thousand volunteers in arms ; it was a Protestant force with Protes- tant officers, and having some claims to make, and the , power to enforce them, they demanded and got the inde- pendence of the Irish Parliament, and the recognition of the Irish House of Lords, as an ultimate court of appeal. The English Houses abandoned by a formal statute the judicial and legislative supremacy they had asserted over Ireland. That is to say, in 1782 Ireland had a national independence, and was held to England only by the fact that the Sovereign of the one island was the Sovereign of the other. Home Rule was granted. How did it answer? We shaU see. The old religious bitterness was partially healed, persecutions came well nigh to an end, but the dominant party was still the minority, the strangers for whom their lands had been confiscated. It was not government of Ireland by the Irish, but by English settled in Ireland, England and Ireland. The great landlords were more rapacious than ever. The English Government had been a check upon them ; the check was gone, and they used their freedom to the utmost. Poverty spread, and deepened into misery. The sight moved the heart of the great Pitt, and in 1785 he dragged a bill through the English Parliament to do away with every obstacle to freedom of trade between England and Ireland. ^ It was intended, and well intended, to create a loyal and prosperous Ireland. He struggled with it almost alone, and against fierce opposition, and by the power of his good cause and great genius fought it through, and handed it to the Irish Parliament, — only to have it instantly flung back by the Irish Protestant faction under Grattan, which then ruled the Irish Parliament. That will give you an idea of what Irish independence meant. It meant rule by a few landlords. The Catholics were refused admission to the franchise, and to equal civil rights. Even the Protestant Englishry had not a fair share of the repre- sentation, and the Catholics were crushed into deeper misery. " If ever there was a country unfit to govern itself," said Lord Hutchinson, "it is Ireland ; a corrupt aristocracy, a ferocious commonalty, a distracted govern- ment, and a divided people." The English war with France gave Ireland another chance, at least the Catholics in it. They had long been hoping for some kind of reform in parliamentary matters. Grattan had been pleading for it with marvellous eloquence ; the United Irishmen Society had pressed for it with vigor- ous words of threatening, but the grasp of the great land owners could not be shaken off. In 1792 Pitt forced on the Irish Parliament measures for the admission of Catholics to the electoral franchise and to civil and military office within the Island, which gave promise of a new era of reli- gious liberty. But the promise was too late in coming. . . li 44 Lecture by Rev. A, J. Bray. U .-It. The United Irishmen had already entered into correspon- dence with France, and formed projects of insurrection. The French Revolution heated the blood of the Irish Catholics to the point of frenzy. Their discontent broke out in social disorder — in the outrages of secret societies of " Defenders " and " Peep o' Day Boys," which spread a panic in the ruling classes. By sheer terror and bloodshed the land owners kept it down. They formed themselves into " Orange " Societies to meet the secret societies about them ; outrages on the one side were met by further tj^ran- ny on the other. The maddened Protestants would enter- tain no notion of further concessions to people whom they looked upon as on the verge of revolt, and parliamentary reform was becoming less and less possible. The Catholics threatened an insurrection if'concessions were not granted ; the Orangemen threatened an insurrection if they were — the United Irishmen actually became a revolutionary body, and sent Wolfe Tone to France to seek aid in a national rising. He was warmly welcomed, ai d in December, 1796, Hoche shipped away from Brest with an army of 25,000 toward the Irish coast. Had it reached Ireland, the Irish might well have been lost to the British Crown. But the winds fought against Hoche as before they had fought against the Spanish Armada. A gale broke up the fleet and hindered the invasion. The prospect of it was enough. It turned Ireland into a hell. Protestant soldiers and yeo- manry marched over the country, scourging and torturing the " croppies," as the Irish peasantry were called for their short cut hair, robbing, ravishing, murdering at their will. The lightest suspicion — unfounded charges were sufficient warrant for bloodshed. The outrages awoke a thrill of hor- ror in the breast of the hardest and blindest English Tories ; but the land owners who formed the Irish Parliament sanc- tioned them in a Bill of Indemnity, and protected the evU England and Ireland. 45 workers for the future by an Insurrection Act. The terror aroused a universal spirit of revolt. Ireland drank in that hate of England and English rule which all the justice and moderation of later governments have failed as yet to des- troy. On the 23rd of May, 1798, the Catholic peasantry rose in arms : 14,000 men, headed by a priest, marched on Wex- ford, took it, and the town became the centre of the revolt. But the old misfortune was still at their heels. They were still looking for help from France — but it did not come, and they were left to fight their own battles. In a horrible way they did it. The Protestants of Wexford were driven into the river, or flung into prison. Another body of insurgents, driven mad by the cruelties of the royal troops, massacred a hundred Protestants in cold blood. The horrors they had suffered were fiercely avenged. Loyalists were lashed and tortured in their turn, and every soldier taken was butchered without mercy. The Ulster Protestants refused to join the rising — the Catholic gentry threw themselves on the side of the Government — Lord Lake appeared before their camp on Vinegar Hill with a strong force of English troops — the camp was stormed — the insurgents dispersed, and when in August General Humbert landed with a French army he found that resis- tance to tho English rule in Ireland had been trodden out in blood. Pitt saw, and said, that the Independence of Ireland meant only a succession of Irish tragedies, and he proposed to unite the two Parliaments. The Irish borough mongers -.and the Dublin Parliament offered it fierce opposition — but it was only a matter of money, and Pitt bought them all, body and soul, for a million pounds sterling, and sundry pensions and peerages the net value of which could not be told. In June, 1800, one hundred Irish members became members of the House tf Commons at Westminster, and 46 Lecture by Rev. A. J. Bray. twenty-eight temporal, with four spiritual peers, took their seats in the House of Lords. Commerce between the two countries was freed from all restrictions, and every trading privilege of the one thrown open to the other. I need not dwell on the story now at length — to talk of the Ribbonmen and the famines — of the great Dan O'Connell, whom any nation would be proud to own, and who fought for the Repeal of the Union, — which was begun in 1810, — but accepted complete Emancipation as a com- promise. I have gone through the record carefully and without flinching. I have not hesitated to dwell on English misrule and tyranny in Ireland. I have shown you Ire- land as an independent country. And up to the point at which I have ceased to merely give history, we can plainly see that, first of all, England had never a settled policy with regard to the Government of Ireland. It simply pursued a policy of expedients. At one time it petted and promised the Irish : at another time it trampled them in the dust. But we cannot say that of the Government now. It has a policy, and that is, Justice to Ireland. The next difficulty arose from the religious question. The Irish were forced into bitter hate of Protestantism because it represented to them cruelty and misery, but the different acts of tolera- tion, followed by the Act of Emancipation, and that fol- lowed by Disestablishment of the Irish Church on the 31st of May, 1869, wiped out that trouble forever and ever. As to Educational matters, much has been done, but more remains yet to be accomplished. I have told you of the Repeal of the Acts forbidding Catholics to teach in School, but further advance was made in 1831, by the establishment of an Irish National School system, which had no aim in it to convert the Irish to Protestantism, and while denominationalism was to be excluded, the course of education was "combined literary and separate religious n England and Ireland, 47 instruction." The Government appointed Commissioners to watch its affairs, and made a grant of public money to sustain it. And a great good has been accomplisiied by it. The schoolmaster abroad has worked wonders, and no one can say that education is not appreciated in Ireland. Some of the people are densely ignorant still — but so are some of the people of England. The School system has not done all it could, and should have done, but that is no fault of the English Government — let the truth be told — it is due to the Church of the majority of the Irish people. The Catholic clergy will have denominational schools — they insist upon it that the catechism and repeating of prayers are the chief things to be learnt, and they interfere and hinder the work of education. What is wanted for Ireland is a system of compulsory education with the Priests left out. But that raises the other and broader question — how are they to find money to pay for this ? They are poor, — they are miserably poor, that is the reason of their ignorance and the solid ground of their discontent. And that raises the land question. I have told you how the Irish land changed hands, — of the three great confiscations which have never been interfered with. But efforts have been made to ameliorate the condition of the Irish tenant. At first he was often a mvjre tenant at will, — perhaps of a middle- man who compelled him to pay rack rent. When he took it there were no buildings upon it, and with every im- provement made he stood the chance of having his rent increased. To make an effort possible on the part of the landlord to ease the circumstances of the tenant, the Government, in 1849, passed the Encumbered Estates Act. The need for it was pressing. A large section of the landlord class were little better than nominal proprietors. A mountain load of mortgages, or a net work of settlements, made it impossible » I 48 Lecture by Rev. A. J. Bray. for them to carry out any scheme for the reform and im- provement of their relations witli tho Leiumts. Many an Irish proprietor with a nominal rent roll of thousands per year possesseil in reality only a few hundreds. They had great names and great houses to maintain on a merely nominal income. Indulgence to tenants was impossible, and the Government came forward to rid the estates of those encumbrances, and give landlord and tenant a fresh start. It was one of the greatest Legislative boons ever conferred on Ireland. Still more legislation was required however. The En- cumbrance Act only removed a dilliculty, that a greater and older one might be reached. The people became poor again, and miserable again, and discontent grew apace in the poor soil. In 1870 Mr. Gladstone boldly grappled with this great evil and passed the Landlord and Tenant Ireland Act, which did justice, so far as an Act of Parliament could do justice, to the tenants. It provided that tenants disturbed, or choos- ing to give place to another tenant, shall claim and have compensation ; it was laboriously careful to make it plain that the English Government had determined that the Irish landlord shall deal fairly with his tenant. I need not wea.y you with the dry details of the Act, but briefly let me say, that by it compensation was made legal and bind- ing, except when a lease of thirty-one years has expired. ■ The compensation is for disturbance and improvements, it gives the tenant the right to choose under what law of compensation lie will claim ; it provides for the sale of lands to the tenants, and for transfer of leases in legal form. It ig often asked now : Is the Irish farmer under any dis- ability to-day unknown in England or Scotland ? Techni- cally he is not. He holds his tmure just as an English or Scotch farmer ; his position on the whole with regard to England and Ireland. 49 leases and compensation is better than that of a farmer in Canada — for here I })elieve a lease of twenty -one years carries no compensation. In Ireland the term is thirty- one years. That so far as it goes is good and sounds wcdl ; but we must remember that Irish history did not begin to be written in 1870, and Irish memory dates farther back than tlie time of the union in 1800. The landlord and tenant system is not what it is in England, because it did not begin in the same way, and has not come down the ages in the same manner. There is the curse of great estates. The total area of Ireland is 20,159,678 acres, of this 452 persons own each more than 135 90 14 3 1 (( (( (( « if (< <( (( « « t< i< « K (( <( (( (( « (< it tt (( <( 5,000 acres. 10,000 20,000 50,000 100,000 170,119 (< (( <( (( 292 persons hold about one-third of the island. And the people remember how those proprietors came by those large tracts of land. They say in effect : You gave ns the Act of Toleration, and of Emancipation, you gave us back our religious rights, but you never gave us back our land. We do not acquire land, we are poor, we are still owned by an alien race. Give us back our own. Now, I am free to acknowledge that the matter is an extremely difficult one to deal with. Turn where you may and yoa will find perplexity. Some of the landlords came into the property by actual purchase, and the others, the original adventurers, took land as payment for money lent , to Government, or arrears of pay as Cromwell's soldiers. Itights in land are not moral, but political. The Act of Settlement was an Act of Parliament, which an Act of Parliament can repeal or amend. Should ij do so ? that is I) < ■■< 50 Lecture by Rev. A. J. Bray. '. !