s I., deprived any Roman
Catholic who should send his son to a foreign school of all protection
of the law; he could neither sue nor defend an action. It may fairly be
said that the credit of Parliament and of the nation was concerned in
the abrogation of laws so ridiculously oppressive, and not the less
obnoxious for being practically invalid. And in the same spirit another
measure was framed and carried by the Lord Chancellor, whose object was
the confirmation of religious endowments belonging to different sects of
Protestant Dissenters, and their protection from vexatious and unjust
litigation, by making a continued possession of any kind of endowment or
property for twenty years a valid title.

These enactments may be regarded as indispensable supplements to the
repeal of the Test Act and Catholic Emancipation. They were the
coping-stone of the great edifice of religious toleration, of which the
former acts had laid the foundation. And the next year Peel carried out
still farther the same principle, by a measure which could not fail to
be regarded as an especial boon in Ireland, since the great majority of
the population of that kingdom were of the Roman Catholic persuasion. It
has been seen that when the troubled state into which the Continent was
thrown by the French Revolution threw hinderances in the way of the
Irish students designed for the Roman Catholic priesthood going to one
of the great Continental colleges, such as St. Omer or Salamanca, for
their education, Pitt established for them a college at Maynooth, for
the endowment of which Parliament was annually asked for a grant of
about L9000. The sum had long been felt to be altogether inadequate to
the requirements of the foundation. As early as the year 1807, Lord
Liverpool, then Home-secretary, had contemplated a large increase of the
grant, though the weakness of the government, then presided over by the
Duke of Portland, prevented him from carrying out that and other
measures which he had conceived in a kindred spirit. Moreover, the grant
was rarely proposed without giving rise to a warm debate raised by a
party whose too tender consciences forbade them to sanction any measure
appearing to foster a religion from which they dissented. And to remedy
the two evils (the one arising from the want of a sufficient provision,
the other from the spirit of religious controversy, for which the House
of Commons was certainly very ill-calculated), Peel, in 1845, pro