“Such were the principal articles of this famous code—­a code which Burke truly described as ’well digested and well disposed in all its parts; a machine of wise and elaborate contrivance, and as well fitted for the oppression, impoverishment, and degradation of a people, and the debasement in them of human nature itself, as ever proceeded from the perverted ingenuity of man.’"[31]

The effects of these laws Mr. Lecky has described thus: 

“The economical and moral effects of the penal laws were, however, profoundly disastrous.  The productive energies of the nation were fatally diminished.  Almost all Catholics of energy and talent who refused to abandon their faith emigrated to foreign lands.  The relation of classes was permanently vitiated; for almost all the proprietary of the country belonged to one religion, while the great majority of their tenants were of another.  The Catholics, excluded from almost every possibility of eminence, deprived of their natural leaders, and consigned by the Legislature to utter ignorance, soon sank into the condition of broken and dispirited helots.  A total absence of industrial virtues, a cowering and abject deference to authority, a recklessness about the future, a love of secret illegal combinations, became general among them.  Above all, they learned to regard law as merely the expression of force, and its moral weight was utterly destroyed.  For the greater part of a century, the main object of the Legislature was to extirpate a religion by the encouragement of the worst, and the punishment of some of the best qualities of our nature.  Its rewards were reserved for the informer, for the hypocrite, for the undutiful son, or for the faithless wife.  Its penalties were directed against religious constancy and the honest discharge of ecclesiastical duty.

“It would, indeed, be scarcely possible to conceive a more infamous system of legal tyranny than that which in the middle of the eighteenth century crushed every class and almost every interest in Ireland."[32]

But laws were not only passed against the native race and the national religion.  Measures were taken to destroy the industries of the country, and to involve natives and colonists, Protestants and Catholics, in common ruin.  Mr. Lecky shall tell the story.

“The commercial and industrial condition of the country was, if possible, more deplorable than its political condition, and was the result of a series of English measures which for deliberate and selfish tyranny could hardly be surpassed.  Until the reign of Charles II. the Irish shared the commercial privileges of the English; but as the island had not been really conquered till the reign of Elizabeth, and as its people were till then scarcely removed from barbarism, the progress was necessarily slow.  In the early Stuart reigns, however, comparative repose and good government were followed by a sudden rush of prosperity.  The land was chiefly pasture, for which it was admirably adapted; the export of live cattle to England was carried on upon a large scale, and it became a chief source of Irish wealth.  The English landowners, however, took the alarm.  They complained that Irish rivalry in the cattle market was reducing English rents; and accordingly, by an Act which was first passed in 1663, and was made perpetual in 1666, the importation of cattle into England was forbidden.