XXI. CHAP. only breathing-time they had known was during the extension of the currency in 1823, and the two next years, 1829. when, with the rise of prices, distress and disaffection had in a great measure disappeared, to be followed only by redoubled suffering after the bill of 1826 had again contracted it. These measures, by producing universal discontent, prepared the soil for the reception of the seed which the Catholic agitators were ready so plentifully to cast upon it. The second was, that the Romish clergy possessed such unbounded influence over their flocks that they were able to organise the whole Catholic population into a vast and disciplined array, alike docile to the voice of their chiefs, and inspired with the most violent hatred towards those whom they had been taught, and not without reason, to regard as their oppressors. It was owing to this combination of circumstances that England was so divided, and Ireland, so far as the Catholics went, so united, that emancipation had become, in a manner, a matter of state necessity before it was actually conceded by the Government. 160. ence be tween the results of emancipa. tion and what was predicted by all par ties. Never, perhaps, was there a great public measure which Great differ- was attended with results so entirely opposite to what was both prophesied and expected in both islands, as Catholic emancipation. The Liberals predicted an entire cessation of agitation and violence, the extinction of all causes of discord between the two islands, and the knitting together of the Saxon and Celtic population in the bonds of peace, tranquillity, and loyalty. The opponents of emancipation predicted from it a vast impulse to the Romish persuasion in Great Britain, the destruction of all the safeguards of Protestantism, and possibly the eventual restoration of the Catholic as the ruling faith of the whole empire. It is hard to say which set of predictions has been most completely falsified by the event. Ireland, so far from having been pacified, has been more agitated than ever since the great healing measure; the cry for the repeal of the Union has succeeded that for the XXI. 1829. removal of the disabilities; monster meetings succeeded, CHAP. and shook the island to its centre; the Whigs themselves were constrained, within five years of the passing of the Relief Bill, to pass a Coercion Act of surpassing severity; and at length matters came to such a pass that a famine of the thirteenth fell on the population of the nineteenth century, and the annual emigration of 250,000 persons at once thinned the redundant numbers, and removed the political dangers of the Emerald Isle. Catholicism, so far from receiving an impulse, has, from the same cause, met with the greatest check it has received in Great Britain since the Reformation: it has become rampant, and revealed its inherent ambition; and the consequence has been a vast revulsion of opinion in the middle and ruling classes of the empire against the tenets of the Vatican, and a determination to resist its encroachments unexampled since the Revolution. The Catholic faith has been embraced by several ladies of rank who sighed for an ecclesiastical opera, and many of fashion who desired the sway of confession, and by some inexperienced men of genius, who dreamt of the amiable illusion of unity of belief; but it has been sturdily resisted by the great body of the people. The grant to Maynooth, small as it is, with difficulty passes the House of Commons; and no one doubts that a reformed House of Commons would never have passed the Relief Bill. 161. tion was a great mea sure. Yet though the results have thus falsified the predictions, and been at variance with the expectations of all Emancipaparties, an impartial consideration of the circumstances of wise and the case leads to the conviction that emancipation was a gre wise and just measure, and such as, under the administration of a beneficent Providence, might be expected to be attended, even in this world, with its deserved reward. It was not for the reasons of policy and state necessity, which were so powerfully put forward by Mr Peel, strong and unanswerable as they undoubtedly were; it was advisable for a greater and more lasting reason that it was XXI. 1829. CHAP. in itself just and equitable. Opinion is not the fit ground either of exclusion, penalty, or punishment; it is acts only which are so. Differences of religious belief are imprinted on the mind so generally by the influence of parentage, habit, country, and circumstances, that they are for the most part as unavoidable as the colour of the hair or the stature of the body. The legislator is entitled to take cognisance of them only when they lead to external acts; and when they do so, let those acts be coerced or punished with vigour and justice. So great have been the evils which have arisen from persecution for differences of religious opinion, that they have gone far to neutralise the whole blessings of Christianity, and led some sceptical observers to hesitate whether it has brought most happiness or misery to mankind. It is the disgrace of Catholicism that it first began this atrocious system, and forced retaliation upon its opponents as a matter, at the time, of necessity. It is the glory of Protestantism that it first inscribed toleration on its banners, and practised it, like the Duke of York in answer to the decree of the Convention forbidding quarter, upon the most inveterate and unrelenting of its opponents. 162. differences unavoid able, when thought of at all. Unity of belief is the dream of the inexperienced, the Religious goal of the ambitious; dissent is the history of man. If, as is the case in many countries, one creed is embraced religion is by a whole nation, it is a proof, not that all think alike on these subjects, but that none think at all. So naturally and universally does difference of opinion arise on every subject, and especially the most interesting which can occupy the human mind, that a more correct measure of the intellectual activity and general intelligence which pervades a people cannot be found than in the amount of religious division which prevails among them. The great object of a wise legislator should be to prevent the difference of thought from leading to conflicting actions; and the only way to do this, is to abolish all political differences founded on varieties of religious persuasion. No prophecy XXI. 1829. of our Saviour was ever more completely accomplished CHAP. than the memorable one, that he came to bring, not peace on earth, but a sword. The reason is to be found in the varieties of the human mind; the different lights in which the same truths present themselves to different intellects; the difference in the moving powers by which different nations or individuals are influenced. Could one creed ever be embraced by the impassioned Italian, who seeks in religion a gratification of his passion for art, and his susceptibility of emotion; the obsequious Russian, who accepts as the commands of Heaven the words of the Czar; and the sturdy Scot, to whom polemical disputes are the very salt and zest of life? Therefore it is that the Gospel is so silent on the matters of church government and form, and directs the whole weight of its authority to combat the selfish principles, the root of all evil in the whole of mankind. The difference lies, not in the truths delivered, but the people taught. Truth, indeed, is ever the same, but so also is the light of the sun; yet in what different aspects do his rays present themselves to the various situations of man-on the sunny hill and in the level plain, on the watery waste and in the burning desert, when piercing the murky clouds of the city and when illuminating the mountain turf, when striking on the summits of the Alps and feebly struggling through the mists of the valley! which tion was re the Roman But although emancipation was thus decisively re- 163. commended by the highest considerations of justice and Unworthy expedience, yet there can be no doubt that the granting spirit in of it was a very great effort of political virtue on the emancipapart of England, and that the concession was against the ceived by wishes and adverse to the sincere and disinterested, and Catholics. therefore respectable, opinions of the great majority of the inhabitants of the empire. As such, it should have been received in a grateful and worthy spirit by the Catholics of Ireland, who beheld a great act of justice done against the inclinations of a majority of their fellow-subjects, and XXI. 1829. CHAP. at a time when no corresponding steps towards liberality had been taken by the governments still adhering to the See of Rome. It was just the reverse: the act of justice was received in the most ungrateful, and even revengeful spirit. So far from being pacified, Ireland was only the more distracted by the great healing measure. The admission of the Catholics to Parliament became the platform on which additional attacks were directed against Protestantism, and even the political institutions of the empire. "The Orangemen," says Miss Martineau, "became more furious and bigoted through fear and jealousy of their triumphant neighbours, and those triumphant neighbours were urged on by their leaders to insufferable insolence towards the Government and sister nations which had granted them relief no longer possible to be withheld. The list of Irish outrages, the pictures of Irish crime which follow in the registers of the time, the record of Catholic emancipation, are very painful; but they show, not that there was anything wrong in the procedure of relief, but that it had been too long delayed."1 1Martineau, i. 504. 164. How it was that Catho pation failed. But although nothing can excuse or even palliate the ingratitude and oblivion of promises which, from the lic emanci- moment when Catholic emancipation was passed, characterised the conduct of the Irish agitators; yet it was neither wholly nor chiefly owing to that cause, and still less to its being so long delayed, that the measure so totally failed in producing the expected results. It failed because it did not alleviate in the slightest degree, but, on the contrary, fearfully aggravated, the real causes of evil in the country. These were the indolent, improvident, and yet reckless character of the peasantry, the extravagance and embarrassment of the landholders, the division of the land among a million of starving cultivators, the habit of incessant and overwhelming increase encouraged by the priests, the absence of manufactories to absorb the redundant numbers, and the total unfitness of the people |