the good of England and Ireland. For these lands not only absorbed the refugees, half-a-million of them altogether, who in character, conduct, and energy were the fine flower of France, but learnt a salutary lesson in toleration which they at last turned to profit. The English people welcomed the exiled Huguenots, and exiled the unwelcome King. Of all the unequal exchanges ever made, surely this is the most amazing. France gave England the Huguenots and received in return James II. But the evil did not end there. This expulsion of the middle class left to France only the nobles and the peasants; there was no intermediate class understanding and sympathising with the high and lowly alike, and in almost exactly a century came the French Revolution. The silent movements of history are greater than the catastrophes which reveal them to us. If time be the greatest of innovators its touch is so gentle that we can scarcely trace its working till some day the rough hand of man tears away the veil and shows us the work already accomplished. The persecution of the Jansenists and the Huguenots destroyed much of the best life of France, and left for the Revolution a nation unable to assimilate the new without destroying much that was valuable in the old. The aristocratic caste, who, with all their faults, contributed energy and resolution to the country, were exiled or murdered. The Church lost its influence, religion ceased to be a controlling force, and does not seem since the Revolution to have regained its position. Such is the bitter penalty France has paid and is still paying for her expulsion of the Huguenots. It is a remarkable commentary upon the law of the inheritance of character. There was no class left in France that could transmit to succeeding generations with unweakened force the qualities of courage and determination which made the French Protestants hard-working men of business, sober and patient, which induced them to accept the Reformed religion, and which made them leave their country rather than abandon their faith. The Mercantilists thought that in every transaction Un the gain of one nation meant the loss of the other. true as this proposition is in the world of business it is most emphatically true in the case of the Huguenots. The loss of France meant the gain of Ireland, and probably in no way has Louis XIV. left a more permanent mark upon the latter country. The tall chimneys and the black smoke of the Ulster factories are indirectly due to the absolute monarch of Versailles. From the haughty sovereign of Paris to the sweat-begrimed artisan of Belfast seems a marked transition, and yet the folly of the one made possible the prosperity of the other. "He builded better than he knew.' For when he signed the decree for the expulsion of a hundred thousand of his subjects he thereby sent many of them to Ireland, and helped to give that country some of the middle class she so sorely wanted. Of this hundred thousand, eighty thousand settled in the British Isles, though some went on to America. Between the chief and the tribesman in Ireland, between the landlord and the tenant, lay few of the middle class that formed the strength of England. Louis sent some of the missing class who powerfully contributed to build up the prosperity of Ulster. The northern province, which had received the Scots in the first Stuart plantation in the opening decade of the seventeenth century, also received the French in the closing decade of the same century in what may be called the "Bourbon plantation." The Celt, the Scot, and the Frenchman all assisted in making Ulster what it is to-day, and to this intermingling of kindred races we trace that energy and enterprise so often characteristic of such blending of blood. Many of the best men in Ulster come from the strong stock of the Huguenots, from Puritan ancestors who scorned delight and lived laborious days, doing strenuously what their hand found to do, and thus fixing a type of character which forms the greatest of national assets. In old farmhouses one may still see on the book-shelf a Genevese French Bible or New Testament of the seventeenth century: on the fly-leaf we may still trace the names of the refugees, written in ink browned by age, illegible from time and perhaps from tears. It is the frail memorial of a race that has left an abiding mark upon the north of Ireland. The very isolation of the newcomersa strange people in a strange land-helped to intensify their special characteristics, and so to increase the debt due from the country which eventually, to its own great gain, assimilated them in its national life.1 The statesman Southwell and the prelate King were fully alive to the many possibilities of this immigration. As we have seen, the former tried to induce Crommelin to come from Lisburn to Kilkenny in the earnest hope that the south and west might become as industrial as the north. The latter endeavoured, with the active assistance of William, to stretch a band of plantations from Limerick to Tipperary with the intention of doing in the south what the Ulster plantation had done in the north. Had these statesmanlike designs succeeded we can see that the history of Ireland would have been utterly different. Her troubles at the present time are largely economic, and in Ireland this means that they are agrarian. If there had been manufactures in the south as there are in the north, the land question could never have become the acute question it has proved to be. For if agriculture were depressed thriving industries might have compensated for the depression, but the paucity of manufactures rendered this source of relief out of the question. There is little use in speculating upon what might have been, still we cannot forbear expressing our intense admiration for the patriotic plans of the English official and the Scots bishop. And if Ireland owes much to English official, Scots farmer, French artisan, it is to be remembered that in the crucible of history these have been fused into intimate union with the native stock, and have become Hibernicis ipsis Hiberniores. It is also to be remembered that Ireland thus enriched has done much for England, and the achievements of great Irishmen who have served in camp or council, in low or 1 Bonn, ii. p. 162. "It was just this individuality that Ireland needed. Only where it was present was Irish colonisation successful. There (i.c. in Ulster) a community grew up, similar in many respects to the Puritan settlements in North America; while in the remaining parts of Ireland the colonists' rule created a social organisation, which may be compared with that of the Slave States." high estate, may well prompt England to adapt a verse of Browning's, and say Here and there did Ireland help me : The answer is for the statesman of to-day and many a tomorrow, but the pages of history, written sometimes in tears, sometimes in blood, will not have been written altogether in vain, if their lessons are rightly read; above all, if they teach that Ireland is greater than any of its parties, and has need of the truest service of all its children working whole-heartedly with a view to the common good. BIBLIOGRAPHY CONTEMPORARY PAMPHLETS AND AUTHORITIES A. A. The Sad State and Condition of Ireland . . . with the Declaration... for disarming all Protestants. London, 1689. Account of the Transactions in the North of Ireland, 1691, with Colonel Michelburne's Account of the Capture of Sligo. London, 1692. Account of the Transactions of the late King James in Ireland. London, 1690. Account of the Persecutions and Oppressions of the Protestants in France. 1688. Account of the Cruelties exercised on the Protestants of France. London, 1689. Account of the Condition of the Protestants in the Palatinate. London, 1699. Account of the Sessions of Parliament in Ireland, 1692. London, 1693. Account of the Charity Schools in Britain and Ireland. 1709. London, The several Acts for the Improvement of the Hempen and Flaxen Manufactures in this Kingdom. Printed at Dublin by Andrew Coote, 1719. Address to King James by the Archbishop of Dublin. London, 1690. Advantages which may arise to the People of Ireland by raising Flax and Flax Seed considered. Dublin, 1732. AICKIN, J. Londerias. Dublin, 1699. ALLEY, G. Siege of Derry. Dublin, 1792. An Answer to a Letter from a Gentleman in the Country to a Member of the House of Commons. Dublin, 1698. Animadversions upon Mien heer Fagel's Letter concerning the Penal Laws. London, 1688. Animadversions on the Proposal for sending back the Nobility and Gentry of Ireland. London, 1690. Answer to a Vindication of Marriage. Dublin, 1704. Answer to the Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufacture. Dublin, 1720. Aphorisms relating to the Kingdom of Ireland, etc. London, 1689. |