of his countrymen.  To win the prizes of public life, judgeships, official posts, and the rest, it was not absolutely necessary to be a Protestant, though for a long time all important offices were held exclusively, and are still held mainly, by Protestants; but it was absolutely necessary to be a thoroughgoing supporter of the Ascendancy, and in thoroughgoing hostility to Irish public opinion as a whole.  In other words, the unwritten Penal Code was preserved after the abolition of the written enactments, and was used for precisely the same pernicious purpose.  It was a subtle and sustained attempt “to debauch the intellect of Ireland,” as Mr. Locker-Lampson puts it, to denationalize her, and to make her own hands the instrument of her humiliation.  The Bar was the principal sufferer, because now, as before, it was the principal road to humiliation.  Fitzgibbons multiplied, so that for generations after the Union some of the ablest Irish lawyers were engaged in the hateful business of holding up their own people to execration in the eyes of the world, of combating legislation imperatively needed for Ireland, and of framing and carrying into execution laws which increased the maladies they were intended to allay.

Let nobody think these phenomena are peculiar to Ireland.  In many parts of the world where Ascendancies have existed, or exist, the same methods are employed, and always with a certain measure of success.  Irish moral fibre was at least as tough as that of any other nationality in resisting the poison.

But the results were as calamitous in Ireland as in other countries.  No country can progress under such circumstances.  The test of government is the condition of the people governed.  Judged by this criterion, it is no exaggeration to say that Ireland as a whole went backward for at least seventy years after the Union.  Even Protestant North-East Ulster, with its saving custom of tenant-right, its linen industry, and all the special advantages derived from a century of privilege, though it escaped the worst effects of the depression, suffered by emigration almost as heavily as the rest of Ireland, and built up its industries with proportionate difficulty.  Over the rest of Ireland the main features of the story are continuous from a period long antecedent to the Union.  A student of the condition of the Irish peasantry in the eighteenth and in the first three-quarters of the nineteenth centuries can ignore changes in the form or personnel of government.  He would scarcely be aware, unless he travelled outside his subject, that Grattan’s Parliament ever existed, or that subsequently a long succession of Whig and Tory Ministers, differing profoundly in their political principles, had alternately sent over to Ireland Chief Secretaries with theoretically despotic powers for good or evil.  These “transient and embarrassed phantoms” came and went, leaving their reputations behind them, and the country they were responsible for in much the same condition.