tholic Church over that island during the last
century.

Let us look back for a moment at the historic relations between Roman
Catholicism and the Irish National cause.

No doubt the iron hammer of Cromwell--in England the rebel, in Ireland
the conqueror--and the long torture of the penal laws both contributed
to weld together the religious and political faith of Ireland. During
those dark days, Nationalism and Catholicism were almost identical
terms. It has been shrewdly remarked that Henry VIII. and Elizabeth
might probably have converted Ireland to Protestantism if they had
preached the reformed faith in the Irish language. However that may be,
it is quite certain that Protestantism stood throughout the eighteenth
century as the sign and uniform of the conqueror and the devastator.
Catholicism remained as the hope and sign of the conquered. Any
Irishman who became a Protestant was naturally suspected of being a
traitor, not merely to his religion but also to his nation.

Yet at the end of the eighteenth century the British Government had a
great opportunity of dividing the national from the religious cause.
Grattan's Parliament, with all its brilliancy and efficiency, was,
after all, a Parliament from which every Catholic was excluded. That
Parliament, indeed, as we have noted, granted the franchise to the
Catholic peasant and abolished the penal laws. But it was part of the
policy of the British Government to show that Grattan's Parliament
could not grant Catholic emancipation in its full sense. The grant was
to be kept as a bribe by which to achieve the policy of the Union.
Anyone who reads the story in the pages of Lecky[53] must see how that
motive ran like a sinister thread throughout the whole working of
British policy from 1795 to 1800.

Well, that policy succeeded only too thoroughly for the time. Among the
various forms of bribery which induced the Irish Parliament to give a
vote for the Union at the second time of asking, the gift of money and
titles were, perhaps, less powerful than the offer of Catholic
emancipation. Recent researches have shown that that offer led to the
conversion of Bishops and their clergy throughout the whole of Ireland,
besides winning over the great body of Catholic Peers.

It is now known, indeed, to be the fact that the British Government
actually induced the Vatican to bring pressure upon the Irish leaders
and the Irish bishops in order to achieve their object. It is almost