This, no doubt, was in great measure due to the neglect with which the scattered Protestant communities were treated, especially in the south and west.  The number of Protestant clergymen was extremely small, as many as six, seven, and even ten livings being frequently held by a single individual, and of these many were absentees, and their place filled by a curate.  Thus—­isolated in a vast Roman Catholic community, often with no church of their own within reach—­the few Protestants drifted by a natural law to the faith of their neighbours.  On the emphatic and angry testimony of Archbishop Boulter, we know that conversions from Protestantism to Catholicism were in his time extremely common amongst the lower orders.  By law, too, no marriage between a Protestant and Catholic was recognizable, yet there were many such, and the children in most cases seem to have reverted to the elder faith.

[Illustration:  “TIGER” ROCHE, A FAMOUS IRISH DUELIST, BORN IN DUBLIN 1729.]

The best side of all this for the Catholics showed itself in that feeling of devotion and fealty to their own faith which persecution rarely fails to awaken, and for which the Roman Catholics of Ireland, high and low alike, have always been honourably distinguished.  The worst was that this sense of being under an immoveable ban sapped at all the roots of manliness and honourable ambition.  Amongst the well-to-do classes the more spirited of the young men went abroad and enlisted under foreign banners.  The rest stayed at home, and fell into an idle, aimless, often disreputable, fashion of existence.  The sense of being of no account, mere valueless items in the social hive, is no doubt answerable for a good deal of all this.  Swift assures us that in his time the Catholic manhood of Ireland were of no more importance than its women and children; of no more importance, he adds in another place, than so many trees.  With a patience pathetic in so essentially impatient a race, both priests and people seem to have settled down after awhile into a sort of desperate acceptance of the inevitable.  So complete indeed was their submission that towards the close of the century we find the English executive, harassed and set at nought by its own Protestant colonists, turning by a curious nemesis to the members of this persecuted creed, whose patience and loyalty three quarters of a century of unexampled endurance seemed to have gone far to prove.

XLVI.

THE COMMERCIAL CODE.

All power, place, and authority had thus once more swung round into the hands of the Protestant colony—­“The Protestant Ascendency,” as it came after a while to be called.  They alone had seats in Parliament, they alone, until near the end of the century, were competent to vote.  Taxes were collected over the whole island, but only Protestants had a voice in their disposal.  All the parliamentary struggles of this century, it must clearly be understood, were