ABSTRACT
In 1782 Ireland entered upon a period of great apparent prosperity which can be not unjustly attributed to her Parliament’s having attained full legislative power to establish the economic prosperity of the country. The tense events of the recent struggle had ended in triumph and left a far more generous spirit and patriotic feeling than had as yet animated the ruling class. Ireland was in fashion, and the expression of this in poetry, literature, and scholarship was pronounced by comparison with the dreary silence of the first half of the century. By the abolition of the greater part of the Penal code, the upper and middle classes of the Roman Catholics were at least enabled to acquire property and to have the status of citizens again. What the old race had suffered by the pressure of this Code, prolonged over a hundred years, cannot be estimated. Its positive results were unfortunately to create in the mass of the people a total lack of confidence in or even a detestation of the law, so that to be against the law was almost the mark of a hero and a friend of the people. Had the Hanoverian dynasty but understood, another fatal result was the estrangement of the popular imagination from the Crown, for which in earlier days, little as it might do for them, both the Irish aristocracy and the peasantry had felt a pronounced loyalty. ‘This race’, it had been said by Sir John Davies, ‘did ever love great personages.’ The greatest Person in the three kingdoms now never came to visit his second realm and for all this person-loving race could know might almost not have existed. The natural alliance should have been the Altar and the Throne; unfortunately this had been rendered impossible for most Irishmen, and their sole devotion was given to the Altar of that Church to which in spite of all the laws they had clung. What Ireland has lost by the suppression of the native intellect and the possibility of genius because of the laws
which for a century condemned the mass of the population to ignorance can also never be reckoned.
