The schools which were founded in order to convert the rising generation were a strange contrast to the admirably conducted institutions established in France and Spain for a similar purpose.  They were so disgracefully mismanaged that the pupils who had passed through them looked back on everything that had been taught them there with a lifelong disgust.

It is needless to say that laws thus carried out were a dead failure as far as winning converts was concerned.  On the other hand, they became in one sense the more galling as the enforcement of them fell into the hands of a low class of informers who had no object beyond making money for themselves.  Still, public feeling was so strong that by the middle of the century the laws had almost fallen into abeyance.  Brook, writing in 1762, says:  “Though these laws are still in force, it is long since they have been in action.  They hang like a sword by a thread over the heads of these people, and Papists walk under them in security and peace; for whoever should adventure to cut this thread would become ignominious and detestable.”  And in 1778 and 1782 (that is, when, as an Irish Roman Catholic writer has pointed out, there was still neither toleration nor peace for Protestant populations in any Catholic state in Europe) the Irish Protestant Parliament formally repealed nearly all the penal laws.

Probably their most lasting effect was that relating to the tenure of land.  If free purchase and sale regardless of religion had been allowed throughout the eighteenth century, one may conjecture that the effect of the Cromwellian confiscations would long since have died away.  But these laws perpetuated that peculiar state of things which has been the cause of so much unhappiness in Ireland—­the landlords generally belonged to one religion, and their tenants and dependents to another.

It may be asked, As these odious laws all came to an end generations ago, what is the good of recalling the sorrows of the past which had much better be forgotten?  I reply, None whatever; and very glad I should be if the whole subject were quietly dropped.  But unfortunately that is just what the Roman Catholic party in Ireland will not do.  One of the ways in which religious animosity is being kept alive (and I regret to say is being steadily increased) is by the teaching in the Roman Catholic schools of exaggerated accounts of the penal laws without referring to any of the mitigating circumstances.  Even in the present year—­1913—­the Lenten pastoral of one of the bishops goes back to the same old subject.  If other countries acted in a similar manner, how could the grievances of bygone centuries ever be forgotten?  The Jews, cruelly treated though they were during the time of the Norman kings, do not harp on the subject in England to-day.  It may be doubted whether all the religious persecutions of Europe put together were as great a disgrace to Christendom as the slave trade—­in which,