upon themselves, and, except in periods of pestilence, famine, or exterminating war, will inevitably increase with excessive rapidity. In Ireland early marriages were still further encouraged by the priests, partly, no doubt, as conducive to morality, and partly because fees at weddings and baptisms were of great importance to an impoverished clergy, excluded from every kind of State provision. In this manner, by a curious nemesis, one of the results of the laws that were intended to crush Catholicism in Ireland was, that after a few years the Catholics increased in a greater ratio than any other portion of the population.1

The same complete subordination of Irish to English interests extended through the political system. Of the revenue of the country the larger part was entirely beyond the control of Parliament. The hereditary revenue, as it existed after the Revolution, still rested substantially on the legislation of Charles II., and it grew in a great measure out of the confiscations after the Rebellion. The lands which had been then forfeited by the Irish, and which were not restored by the Act of Settlement, had been bestowed during the Commonwealth on English soldiers. If the Crown at the Restoration had exercised its legal right of appropriating them, it would have obtained a vast revenue; but as

The effect of the penal laws in promoting the rapid multiplication of the Catholic population is well treated by Sir Cornewall Lewis in his Essay on Irish Disturbances one of the best books on Irish history and on the conditions of Irish life. The early marriage of Papists is noticed in Madden's Reflections and Resolutions. Our Protestants do not marry young, but they wait for a tolerable portion and some settle

ment to live easy on; whereas the Papists are careless as to wealth and portion, and will have wives, let them be maintained how they will' (p. 194). Dobbs imagined that the Papists make it a principle of conscience to increase their numbers, for the good of the Catholic religion, as they call it,' and that their religious zeal was the explanation of their many babies. Dobbs On Trade, part 2, p. 13.

such a course would have been extremely difficult and dangerous, it was arranged by the Act of Settlement that the Crown should resign its right to these forfeitures, receiving in compensation a new hereditary revenue. The older forms of Crown property were at the same time either incorporated into this revenue or abolished with compensation, and the new hereditary revenue, as settled by Parliament, was vested for ever in the King and his successors. It was derived from many sources, the most important being the Crown rents, which arose chiefly from the religious confiscations of Henry VIII. and from the six counties that were forfeited after the rebellion of Tyrone; the quit rents, which had their origin in the confiscations that followed the rebellion of 1641; the hearth-money, which was first imposed upon Ireland under Charles II.; licences for selling ale, beer, and strong waters, and many excise and Custom House duties. For many years this revenue was sufficient for all the civil and military purposes of the Government, and no Parliament, with the exception of that which was convoked by James after his expulsion from England, sat in Ireland in the twenty-six years that elapsed between the Restoration and the Parliament which was summoned by Lord Sydney in 1692. The increase of the army, the erection of barracks, and other expenses resulting from the Revolution had made the hereditary revenue insufficient, and it became necessary to ask for fresh supplies. This insufficiency of the hereditary revenue laid the foundation of the power of Parliament, and that power was increased when the Government found it necessary in 1715 to borrow 50,000l. for the purpose of taking military measures to secure the new dynasty. The national debt, which had before this time been only 16,000l., became now a considerable element in the national finances. It grew in the next fifteen years to rather more than 330,000l., and a series of new

duties were imposed by Parliament for the purpose of paying the interest and principal.1

These circumstances led to the summoning of Parliament every second year, and to the gradual enlargement of its power, but its legitimate prerogative was a matter of constant and vehement dispute, and its actual position was one of most humiliating dependence. It exercised a partial and imperfect control over the finances of the country, and claimed unsuccessfully the sole right of originating Money Bills; but the English Parliament, though it refrained from taxing Ireland, assumed and repeatedly exercised the right of binding it by its legislation without any concurrence of the national legislature.2 By a declaratory English Act of George I. this right was emphatically asserted, and even in its own legislation the Irish Parliament was completely subordinate to the English Privy Council. Its dependence rested upon Poynings' Act, which was passed under Henry VII., and amended under Philip and Mary. At one time the Irish Parliament could not be summoned till the Bills it was called upon to pass were approved under the Great Seal of England; and, although it afterwards obtained the power of originating heads of Bills, it was necessary before they became law that they should be submitted to the English Privy Council, which had the right either of rejecting or of altering them, and the Irish Parliament, though it might reject, could not alter a Bill returned in an amended form from England. The appellate jurisdiction of the Irish House of Lords was

1 See Howard On the Revenue of Ireland, i. 28-30. Lord Macartney's Account of Ireland. An Account of the Revenue and National Debt of Ireland (London, 1754). Proceedings of the House of Commons of Ireland in rejecting the Altered Money Bill,

on Dec. 1753, vindicated (Dublin, 1754). The net hereditary revenue for the year ending March 25, 1753, was 442,6827.

2 See a long list of these Acts in Crawford's Hist. of Ireland, ii. 236-238, 243.

withdrawn from it by a mere act of power in the Annesley case in 1719. The constitution of the House of Commons was such that it lay almost wholly beyond the control of public opinion. By an English law passed at a time when the Irish Parliament was not sitting, the Catholics were precluded from sitting among its members, and as they were afterwards deprived of the suffrage, the national legislature was thus absolutely cut off from the bulk of the Irish people. The Nonconformists were not formally excluded, but the test clause, which was also of English origin, shut them out from the corporations by which a large proportion of the members were elected.1 At the same time the royal prerogative of creating boroughs was exerted to an extent unparalleled in England. No less than forty boroughs had been created by James I., thirty-six by the other sovereigns of his house, and eleven more boroughs were for the first time represented in the Parliament which met in 1692. The county representation appears to have been tolerably sound; but out of the 300 members of the Irish House of Commons, 216 were elected by boroughs and manors, and of these members 176, according to the lowest estimate, were elected by individual patrons, while very few of the remainder had really popular constituencies. It was stated in 1784 that fifty Members of Parliament were then elected by ten individuals.2

'Thus, in a case relating to a contested election for Belfast in 1707, the Commons resolved, 'that by the Act to prevent the further growth of Popery, the burgesses of Belfast were obliged to subscribe the declaration and receive the Sacrament according to the usage of the Church of Ireland, and that the burgess-ship of the said burgesses of Belfast who had not subscribed the declaration

and received the Sacrament pursuant of the said Act was by such neglect become vacant.'-Mant's Hist. of the Church of Ireland, ii. 137.

2 See Lord Mountmorres' Hist. of the Irish Parliament. Letter to Henry Flood on the State of Representation in Ireland (Belfast, 1783). Grattan's Life, by his son. Grattan's Speeches on Parliamentary Reform. Massey's

Even this, however, is not a full statement of the case. The Habeas Corpus Act, the great guarantee of personal liberty in England, did not extend to Ireland, and Ireland was carefully excluded from the chief constitutional benefits of the Revolution. Parliaments in England were made triennial and afterwards septennial, but in Ireland they might last for a whole reign, and that of George II. was actually in existence for thirtythree years. The Irish judges still held office at pleasure. An Irish Bill containing the chief provisions of the Bill of Rights was sent to England under the Viceroyalty of Lord Sydney, but it was never returned. The Established Church, representing as it did an infinitesimal fraction of the people, was made a chief instrument of government. So large a proportion of peers in the beginning of the eighteenth century were habitual absentees that in the time of Swift the bishops constituted about half the working majority of the House of Lords; they even returned by their borough influence some of the members of the Lower House, and they were conspicuous among the Lords Justices who governed Ireland during the prolonged absence of the Viceroy. From 1724 to 1764 the chief direction of affairs was, with little intermission, practically in the hands of three successive primatesBoulter, Hoadly, and Stone. Every bishop who was appointed was expected to use his influence in favour of the Government.2 The peerages were given almost ex