A crowd of Irish women and children lined the shore at Limerick, watching with tearful eyes the receding sails of the fleet which bore away their husbands and fathers, the garrison of the last Catholic stronghold, to service in foreign lands. The defenders of Limerick were thus exchanged for the Huguenot exiles who had charged and conquered at Aghrim. Those men, with many an exile from Catholic Ireland who followed in their track, went to form the Irish brigade and to redeem on foreign fields battles lost in their own land. IX In that mortal struggle, had the Catholic won, he would have deprived the Protestant certainly of his land, perhaps of his life. The Protestant, having won, proceeded at once to avenge and secure himself by binding down his vanquished foe with chains of iron. Chains of iron indeed they were. By the series of enactments called the Penal Code, passed by the Irish Parliament with some assistance from that of England, the Irish Catholic was reduced to helotage political and social, while measures were taken for the extirpation of his religion. To crush him politically he was excluded from Parliament, from the franchise, from municipal office, from the magistracy, from the jury box, as well as from public appointments of all kinds, and even from the police force. To crush him socially he was excluded from all the higher callings but that of medicine, from the bench, from the bar, and from the army. He was denied the armorial bearings which denoted a gentleman. To divorce him from the land, he was forbidden to acquire freehold or a lease beneficial beyond a certain rate; he was debarred from bequeathing his estate; and his estate was broken up by making it heritable in gavelkind. The gate of knowledge was closed against him. He was shut out of the university; forbidden to open a school; forbidden to send his children abroad for education. That he might never rise against oppression, he was disarmed and prohibited from keeping a horse of more than five pounds' value. He might not even be a gamekeeper or a watchman.