stant, was treated as a stranger and a foreigner in his own
country. The House of Lords, the House of Commons, the magistracy, all
corporate offices in towns, all ranks in the army, the bench, the bar,
the whole administration of government or justice, were closed against
Catholics. The very right of voting for their representatives in
Parliament was denied them. Few Catholic landowners had been left by the
sweeping confiscations which had followed the successive revolts of the
island, and oppressive laws forced even these few with scant exceptions
to profess Protestantism. Necessity indeed had brought about a practical
toleration of their religion and their worship; but in all social and
political matters the native Catholics, in other words the immense
majority of the people of Ireland, were simply hewers of wood and
drawers of water for Protestant masters, for masters who still looked on
themselves as mere settlers, who boasted of their Scotch or English
extraction, and who regarded the name of "Irishman" as an insult.

[Sidenote: Irish Government.]

But small as was this Protestant body, one-half of it fared little
better as far as power was concerned than the Catholics. The
Presbyterians, who formed the bulk of the Ulster settlers, were shut out
by law from all civil, military, and municipal offices. The
administration and justice of the country were thus kept rigidly in the
hands of members of the Established Church, a body which comprised
about a twelfth of the population of the island, while its government
was practically monopolised by a few great Protestant landowners. The
rotten boroughs, which had originally been created to make the Irish
Parliament dependent on the Crown, had by this time fallen under the
influence of the adjacent landlords, whose command of these made them
masters of the House of Commons while they themselves formed in person
the House of Peers. To such a length had this system been carried that
at the time of the Union the great majority of the boroughs lay in the
hands of a very few families. Two-thirds of the House of Commons, in
fact, was returned by a small group of nobles, who were recognised as
"parliamentary undertakers," and who undertook to "manage" Parliament on
their own terms. Irish politics was for these men a mere means of public
plunder; they were glutted with pensions, preferments, and bribes in
hard cash, in return for their services; they were the advisers of every
Lord