"A further act was passed, in 1709, imposing additional penalties. The first clause declares that no Papist shall be capable of holding an annuity for life. The third provides that the child of a Papist, on conforming, shall at once receive an annuity from his father; and that the chancellor shall compel the father to discover, upon oath, the full value of his estate, real and personal, and thereupon make an order for the support of such conforming child or children, and for securing such a share of the property, after the father's death, as the court shall think fit. The fourteenth and fifteenth clauses secure jointures to Popish wives who shall conform. The sixteenth prohibits a Papist from teaching, even as assistant to a Protestant master. The eighteenth gives a salary of £30 per annum to Popish priests who shall conform. The twentieth provides rewards for the discovery of Popish prelates, priests, and teachers, according to the following whimsical scale: For discovering an archbishop, bishop, vicar-general, or other person, exercising any foreign ecclesiastical jurisdiction, £50; for discovering each regular clergyman, and each secular clergyman not registered, £20, and for discovering each Popish schoolmaster or usher, £10. The twenty-first clause empowers two justices to summon before them any Papist over eighteen years of age, and interrogate him when and where he last heard Mass said, and the names of the persons present, and likewise touching the residence of any Popish priest or schoolmaster; and if he refuses to give testimony, subjects him to a fine of £20, or imprisonment for twelve months. "Several other penal laws were enacted by the same parliament, of which we can only notice one; it excludes Catholics from the office of sheriff, and from grand juries, and enacts that, in trials upon any statute for strengthening the Protestant interest, the plaintiff might challenge a juror for being a Papist, which challenge the judge was to allow."--_McGee's Ireland_, vol. ii. pp. 605, 608. We may here turn from this repulsive record of tyrannous legislation to inquire into the consequences of it all at the end of the second, and once again at the end of the third century, from the reformation. George II. came to the throne in 1727, and bequeathed it to his successor in 1760. This generation saw, therefore, the close of the second century of the great Protestant experiment; and if a centennial celebration had been proposed to them in 1751, the report of progress made must have included the following principal facts.