h with these atrocious crimes.
I am bound to say that I think he disproves the charge of
ecclesiastical complicity. The evidence upon which Froude relied,
the only evidence accessible, is the collection of presentments by
Grand Juries, with the accompanying depositions, in Dublin Castle.
In the first sixty years of the eighteenth century there were
twenty-eight cases of abduction thus recorded. In only four of them
can it be shown that the perpetrator was a Catholic and the victim a
Protestant. In only one, which Froude has described at much length,
did the criminal try to make a Protestant girl attend mass. For one
of the cases, which according to Froude went unpunished, two men
were hanged. "The truth is," says Lecky, "that the crime was merely
the natural product of a state of great lawlessness and barbarism."*
These offences have so completely disappeared from Ireland that even
the memory of them has perished, and yet Ireland remains as Catholic
as ever. Arthur Young, who denounces them as scandalous to a
civilised community, does not hint that they had anything to do with
religion, nor were they ever cited in defence of the penal code.
Froude was led astray by religious prejudice, and forgot for once
the historian in the advocate. The penal codes were rather the cause
than the effect of crime and outrage in Ireland. By setting
authority on one side, and popular religion on the other, they made
a breach of the law a pious and meritorious act. The bane of English
rule in Ireland at that time was the treatment of Catholics as
enemies, and the, Charter Schools which Froude praises were employed
for the purpose of alienating children from the faith of their
parents. This mean and paltry persecution strengthened instead of
weakening the Roman Catholic Church.

--
* England in the Eighteenth Century, ii. 365.
--

Meanwhile Froude continued his History, and by the beginning of the
year 1874 had brought it down to the Union, with which it concludes.
No more unsparing indictment of a nation has ever been drawn. Except Lord
Clare, and the Orange Lodges, formed after the Battle of the Diamond,
scarcely an Irishman or an Irish institution spared. Grattan's Parliament,
though it did contain a single Catholic, is condemned because it
gave the Catholics votes in 1793. The recall of Lord Fitzwilliam, an
Englishman and a Protestant, in 1795, is justified because he was in
favour of emancipation. Flood and Curran are treated with