Mr. Lecky says that he thinks a candid reader will, on the whole, be struck "with the small amount of real religious fanaticism displayed by the Irish in the contest." (History of England in the Eighteenth Century, II., p. 167.) In his History of Rationalism in Europe he refers to an incident in this Rebellion narrated more in detail in his History (see History of England in the Eighteenth Century, II., pp. 166167), which illustrates that religious toleration which he regards as a remarkable aspect of the Irish character:—

"Of all the outbreaks [he writes] against the English power, that of 1641 was probably the most passionate and most vindictive. In that Rebellion one Englishman of distinction was exempt from the hostility that attached to his race. He was treated with the most respectful and even affectionate deference, and when he died he was borne to the grave with all the honours the rebel army could afford. That Englishman was Bishop Bedell, the councillor of Sarpi and De Dominis, and the founder of proselytism in Ireland."-(Rationalism in Europe, II., pp. 6-7.)

IV. The Irish Catholic Parliament of James II.-Mr. Chamberlain, in a speech delivered at a Unionist demonstration at Bodmin on the 17th October, 1889, thus enunciated the ordinary Unionist view of the Irish Parliament of James II. :

"But [he said] let me give you a chapter of Irish history. It will not be very long if you will bear with me. It is rather a coincidence that you had in Ireland exactly 200 years ago a Roman Catholic Parliament. It was the only Roman Catholic Parliament that Ireland ever had. This Roman Catholic Parliament proceeded to pass two of the most monstrous Acts which ever have been passed by any Parliament in the history of the world. The first was an Act of Confiscation. They confiscated the whole of the settled land of the country. Fifteen million of acres which had been settled by Protestants were taken away from them and handed over to the Roman Catholics. Not content with that they passed in the next place an Act of Attainder, by which at one stroke of the pen they condemned for treason 2,445 men in every rank of life, and made them amenable to the penalties of death and of forfeiture. That was the action of the only Roman Catholic Parliament Ireland ever had."—(Times, October 18th, 1889.)

Mr. Chamberlain's "chapter of Irish history" abounds in inaccuracies and misconceptions which several years previously had been the subject of Mr. Lecky's strictures. The Act of the Irish Parliament to repeal the Act of Settlement, which Mr. Chamberlain designates "the Act of Confiscation," was a measure whose "nature," to use the words of Mr. Lecky, "is almost universally misunderstood on account of the extreme inaccuracy and imperfection of the description of it in the brilliant narrative of Lord Macaulay. The preamble asserts that the outbreak of 1641 had been solely due to the intolerable oppression and to the disloyal conduct of the Lords Justices and the Puritan Party; that the Catholics of Ireland before the struggle had been concluded had been fully reconciled to the Sovereign; that they had received from the Sovereign a full and formal pardon; a id that the ro; al word had,

in consequence, been pledged to the restitution of their properties. This pledge by the Act of Settlement had been to a great extent broken, and the Irish legislators maintained that the twenty-four years which had elapsed since that Act had not annulled the rights of the old proprietors or their descendants. They maintained that these claims were not only valid but were prior to all others, and they accordingly enacted that the heirs of all persons who had possessed landed property in Ireland on October 22nd, 1641, and who had been deprived of their inheritance by the Act of Settlement, should enter at once into possession of their properties. The owners who were to be displaced were of two kinds; some of them were the adventurers or soldiers of Cromwell, and these were to be dispossessed absolutely and without compensation. No inquiry was to be made into the particular charges alleged against the original proprietor at the time of the confiscation. No regard was paid to the fact that the adventurers had obtained their land in compensation for sums of money lent on that condition to the Government under Act of Parliament. No allowance was to be made for the large sums which, in innumerable cases, the adventurers had expended in buildings and in other improvements. At the time of the Settlement, when it was found impossible to satisfy the just claims of both parties, the Irish were invariably sacrificed, and by the Irish Parliament this rule was reversed. The confiscation, it maintained, was from the first fraudulent; the claims of the old proprietors must override all others, and a wrongful enjoyment for twenty-four years was a sufficient compensation to the adventurers for the money they had lent."... "The Act of the Irish Parliament has been described as if it completely disregarded and swept away the property of purchasers for value without compensation. But whatever may have been the faults of the Irish Parliament of 1689, this charge at least is grossly calumnious. The Irish legislators maintained indeed that the sales which had been effected could not invalidate the claims of old proprietors to re-enter into property of which they had been unjustly deprived, but they admitted in clear and express terms the right of the purchasers to full compensation."—(History of England in the Eighteenth Century, II., pp. 184-188.)

Mr. Lecky's comments on one "of the two most monstrous Acts that have ever been passed in the history of the world," are singularly temperate :

"The Act [he says] must be judged in the light of the antecedent events of Irish history, and with a due allowance for the passions of a civil war, for the peculiar position of the legislators (who were largely composed of the sons of the men who had been dispossessed of their properties), and for the extreme difficulty of all legislation on this subject. An inquisition into titles limited to thirtyeight years could hardly appear extraordinary in a country where such inquisitions had very recently extended over centuries, or to men whose fathers had vainly asked that sixty years of undisturbed possession should secure them in

the enjoyment of their estates."-(England in the Eighteenth Century, II., p. 187.)

Mr. Lecky is equally at issue with Mr Chamberlain in his estimate of the Act of Attainder.

"Its injustice [says Mr. Lecky] cannot reasonably be denied, and it forms the great blot on the reputation of the short Parliament of 1689, though a few things may be truly said to palliate and explain it. There is no ground for the assertion that it was of the nature of a religious proscription. It was inevitable that Protestant landlords should have usually taken the side of William, and Catholic landlords the side of James; but religion is not even mentioned in the Act, and among the attainted persons a few were Catholics. Nor is it probable that it was ever intended to put in force the more sanguinary part of the sentence. It is not alleged that a single person was executed under the Act, and though the common soldiers on the side of William, and the rapparees on the side of James, were guilty of much violence, it cannot be said that the leaders on either side showed in their actions any disposition to add unnecessarily to the tragedy of the struggle. If the Irish Act of Attainder was almost unparalleled in its magnitude, it was at least free from one of the worst faults of this description of legislation, for it did not undertake to supersede the action of the law It was a conditional attainder launched in the midst of a civil war against men who, having recently disregarded the summons of their Sovereign, were beyond the range of the law in case they refused to appear during an assigned interval before the law courts for trial. The real aim of the Act was confiscation, and in this respect at least it was by no means unexampled. Every political trouble in Ireland had long been followed by a confiscation of Irish soil." -History of England in the Eighteenth Century, II., pp. 192-3.)

courts.

"It is [Mr. Lecky further observes] a curious illustration of the carelessness or partiality with which Irish history is written that no popular historian has noticed that five days before this Act which has been described without a parallel in the history of civilised countries was introduced into the Irish Parliament, a Bill, which appears in its essential characteristics to have been precisely similar, was introduced into the Parliament of England, that it passed the English House of Commons, that it passed, with slight amendments, the English House of Lords, and that it was only lost in its last stage by a prorogation."-(History of England in the Eighteenth Century, II., p. 194.)

Mr. Lecky, who widely differs from Mr. Chamberlain in the measure of condemnation with which the two most questionable measures of the Parliament designated by Mr. Chamberlain in his "chapter of Irish history" as the only Irish Catholic Parliament, gives the following generous estimate of the conduct of that body on a comprehensive view of its action

"It will hardly appear surprising to candid men that a Parliament so constituted, and called together amid the excitement of a civil war, should have displayed much violence, much disregard for vested interests. Its measures, indeed, were not all criminal. By one Act, which was far in advance of its age, it established perfect religious liberty in Ireland, and although that measure was no doubt mainly due to motives of policy, its enactment in such a moment of excitement and passion reflects no small credit on the Catholic Parliament. By another Act, repealing Poynings' Law and asserting its own legislative independence, it anticipated the doctrine of Molyneaux, Swift, and Grattan, and claimed a position which, if it could have been maintained, would have saved

Ireland from at least a portion of these commercial restrictions which a few years later reduced it to a condition of the most abject wretchedness. A third measure abolished the payments to Protestant clergy in the corporate towns, while a fourth ordered that Catholics throughout Ireland should henceforth pay their tithes and other ecclesiastical dues to their own priests, and not to the Protestant clergy. The Protestants were still to pay their tithes to their own clergy... who were guaranteed full liberty of professing, practising, and teaching their religion. Several other measures--most of them now only known by their titles were passed for developing the resources of the country or remedying some great abuse. Among them were Acts for encouraging strangers to plant in Ireland, for the relief of distressed debtors, for the removal of the incapacities of the native Irish, for the recovery of waste lands, for the improvement of trade, shipping, and navigation, and for establishing free schools.”—(History of England in the Eighteenth Century, II., pp. 182-184.)1

I have entered at some length into this exposition, in which I have indicated, in Mr. Lecky's own words, the wide divergence of opinion which separates him and the ordinary Unionist politician on the merits of an episode of Irish history which cannot be regarded as a matter of speculative interest, but is frequently utilised by political speakers of Mr. Lecky's own party for the purpose of fostering distrust of the Irish people in the hearts of the public of Great Britain.

V. The Rebellion of 1798.-Colonel Saunderson, M.P., speaking in debate on the motion for leave to introduce Mr. Gladstone's first Home Rule Bill on the 12th April, 1886, was interrupted while giving the ordinary Unionist account of the transactions which led up to the Irish Rebellion of 1798 by an interposition of Mr. Gladstone, who was at the time the Prime Minister of the Government, charged with the carriage of the Bill. "He (Mr. Gladstone) did not," said Colonel Saunderson," refer to the commercial or social condition of the country because he knew as well as I do that Grattan's Parliament led up to the Rebellion of 1798. (Mr. Gladstone: Mr. Pitt led up to it.') The right hon. gentleman says that Mr. Pitt led up to it. I am not surprised in the least at that observation, because it is the observation I expected to hear. It is always Englishmen who have done these things; it is always something done by those who uphold law and order. Well, sir, I will not pursue this topic further."

Mr. Lecky must share, with Mr. Gladstone, Colonel Saunderson's censure on the men who bring charges against "those who uphold law and order in Ireland," since Mr. Lecky contends, in language that is quite unmistakable, that Mr. Pitt's policy "led up" to the Rebellion of 1798. Commenting on the sudden recall in 1795 from the Lord Lieutenancy of Lord Fitzwilliam, a Viceroy who had come to Ireland in favour of a policy of complete Catholic Emancipation, Mr. Lecky

says:

(1) This Parliament met in Dublin in an ancient building which had once been a convent of Dominican Friars, but had since the Reformation been made an Inn of Court, and bore the name of the King's Inns. The site is now occupied by the Four Courts.

"It is probable that he (Mr. Pitt) was already looking forward to the Union. The steady object of his later Irish policy was to corrupt and degrade in order that he ultimately might destroy the Legislature of the country. Had (the Irish) Parliament been a mirror of the national will, had the Catholics been brought within the pale of the constitution, his policy would have been defeated." "By raising the hopes of the Catholics almost to certainty, and then dashing them to the ground by taking this step at the very moment when the inflammatory spirit engendered by the Revolution had begun to spread amongst the people, Pitt sowed in Ireland the seeds of discord and bloodshed, of religious animosities and social disorganization, which paralysed the energies of the country, and rendered possible the success of his machinations.

"The Rebellion of 1798, with all the accumulated misery it entailed, was the direct and predicted consequence of his policy."—(Leaders of Public Opinion in Ireland, p. 147.)

I have not consciously, in presenting to the public this series of points of difference in Irish matters between Mr. Lecky and the Unionist Party, cited from the previous writings of Mr. Lecky any opinion which has been altered or modified by the historical judgments of his later years. To his early view of the character of the Irish Parliament, Mr. Lecky has, as I have shown in a letter written in the heat of the Unionist controversy, expressly adhered.

Mr. Lecky is, no doubt, a strong and vehement opponent of the Home Rule policy, and has been returned to Parliament by Dublin University in recognition of his pre-eminent services to the Union. Irish Nationalists must, however, regard him as an author whose writings have most powerfully contributed to the fostering of an enlightened and enthusiastic public opinion in favour of the restoration to Ireland of her own Parliament. In Mr. Lecky's later writings he may be less emphatic than he has been in former years in the expression of scena indignatio when reciting the steps of stupendous iniquity which "led up to the Irish Union. Mr. Gladstone, in an article in the Nineteenth Century for June, 1887, reviewing the fifth and sixth volumes of Mr. Lecky's History of England thinks that he detects this tendency.

"In truth [writes Mr. Gladstone], while Mr. Lecky's honesty is as conspicuous in these pages as his ability, the volumes leave on my mind the impression that his view of Irish affairs has, since he began to write, been coloured retrospectively by the vehemence of his hostility to the modern proposal of Home Rule. It might even seem that he was obliged to tamper a little with his own manuscript, that since the bulk of the text was written there have been set upon it panni, and those not purpurei, to countervail or qualify its effect."

If this view be correct, Mr. Lecky's testimony is still the more valuable as it comes from a reluctant, though absolutely unimpeachable, witness. The historical writings of one of the ablest opponents of Irish Nationality, in so far as they relate to Ireland, are unquestionably sustained and brilliant powerful arguments for Home Rule. J. G. SWIFT MACNEILL.