The faults he found were grave, and his censure was not the less severe for being decorous.  An Anglicised Irishman, living in England, though a graduate of Dublin University, Lecky became known when he was a very young man for a brilliant little book on Leaders of Irish Opinion.  He had since published mature and valuable histories of rationalism, and of morals.  His History of England in the Eighteenth Century is likely to remain a standard book, being written with fairness, lucidity, and candour.  It is true that in his Irish chapters, with which alone I am concerned, Lecky, like Froude, wrote with a purpose.  He was an Irish patriot, and bent on making out the best possible case for his own country.

At the same time he was, for an Irishman, singularly impartial between Catholic and Protestant, leaning, if at all, to the Protestant side.  Yet he repudiated with indignant vehemence Froude’s attempt to connect the Catholic Church with these atrocious crimes.  I am bound to say that I think he disproves the charge of ecclesiastical complicity.  The evidence upon which Froude relied, the only evidence accessible, is the collection of presentments by Grand Juries, with the accompanying depositions, in Dublin Castle.  In the first sixty years of the eighteenth century there were twenty-eight cases of abduction thus recorded.  In only four of them can it be shown that the perpetrator was a Catholic and the victim a Protestant.  In only one, which Froude has described at much length, did the criminal try to make a Protestant girl attend mass.  For one of the cases, which according to Froude went unpunished, two men were hanged.  “The truth is,” says Lecky, “that the crime was merely the natural product of a state of great lawlessness and barbarism."* These offences have so completely disappeared from Ireland that even the memory of them has perished, and yet Ireland remains as Catholic as ever.  Arthur Young, who denounces them as scandalous to a civilised community, does not hint that they had anything to do with religion, nor were they ever cited in defence of the penal code.  Froude was led astray by religious prejudice, and forgot for once the historian in the advocate.  The penal codes were rather the cause than the effect of crime and outrage in Ireland.  By setting authority on one side, and popular religion on the other, they made a breach of the law a pious and meritorious act.  The bane of English rule in Ireland at that time was the treatment of Catholics as enemies, and the, Charter Schools which Froude praises were employed for the purpose of alienating children from the faith of their parents.  This mean and paltry persecution strengthened instead of weakening the Roman Catholic Church.

—­ * England in the Eighteenth Century, ii. 365. —­