foes; law sate at his hearth to make his existence wretched. The Irish Catholic, too, was forbidden to acquire land by purchase or even to possess an incumbrance on it; as far as possible the ownership of land was strictly confined to the Protestant caste. But the wrong that, in its consequences at least, was perhaps the worst, was that the Catholic occupier of the Irish soil could not obtain anything like an advantageous tenure; he could not have a lease for a period beyond thirty-one years, and this, too, at an excessive rent; and, in the great mass of instances, he was a serf holding merely at will. The forty years that succeeded the death of William III. are certainly the most mournful period in Irish history. The memories of conquest and confiscation were still fresh; the Penal Code kept Catholic Ireland in its chains; society was fashioned on the type of the domination of a class, separated from a whole community in race and faith. Nothing was left undone to perpetuate this evil order of things; the Irish Parliament was a mere oligarchy of the sons of the colonists of Elizabeth, Cromwell, and William, apart from a few leading men in Ulster; its legislation for the vanquished race was barbarous; Lords-Lieutenant spoke of the Irish Catholics as of 'the common enemy;' a 'Papist was presumed not to exist' in the Irish Courts of Justice. Meanwhile the penal laws were relentlessly carried out for years; the Irish Catholic was placed under a universal ban; the Catholic Church of Ireland lay, as it were, in the valley of the shadow of death. But the direst consequences appeared in the land, and in the social life of the landed classes; these were most calamitous and have still left their traces. Many of the few Catholic owners abandoned their estates, and carried their swords into foreign lands, where some rose to well-deserved eminence; a small number conformed to the dominant faith in order to exist in comparative peace at home; the majority clung to their lands and bowed their heads to oppression. The Protestant lords of the soil were what their antecedents and the law had made them; they were long a harsh and exacting order of men, filled with bigotry and the pride of a conquering race; they regarded the inferiors they ruled as pariahs and helots. But, as usually happens, when society is in an unnatural state, they did not prosper amidst the ruins around them; their lands were kept on a kind of pernicious mortmain, as they could not mortgage or sell them freely; absenteeism with all its mischiefs greatly increased; and middleman tenures largely multiplied, subjecting the peasantry to a detestable breed of landlords, Protestants and of English descent, like their superiors, but much worse tyrants. As for the mass of the Catholic occupiers of the soil, they were kept down in the lowest state of serfdom; but multitudes found their way into foreign armies; 'the wild geese,' as