In mental culture Scotland had an indisputable superiority.

Though that kingdom was then the poorest in Christendom, it already vied in every branch of learning with the most favoured countries.

Scotsmen, whose dwellings and whose food were as wretched as those of the Icelanders of our day, wrote Latin verse with more than the delicacy of Vida, and made discoveries in science which would have added to the renown of Galileo. Ireland could boast of no Buchanan or Napier.

The genius with which her aboriginal inhabitants were largely endowed showed itself as yet only in ballads, which, wild and rugged as they were, seemed to the judging eye of Spenser to contain a portion of the pure gold of poetry.

Scotland, in becoming part of the British monarchy, preserved all her dignity. Having during many generations courageously withstood the English arms, she was now joined to her stronger neighbour on the most honourable terms.

She gave a king instead of receiving one. She retained her own constitution and laws.

Her tribunals and parliaments remained entirely independent of the tribunals and parliaments which sat at Westminster. The administration of Scotland was in Scottish hands, for no Englishman had any motive to emigrate northward, and to contend with the shrewdest and most pertinacious of all races for what was to be scraped together in the poorest of all treasuries.

Meanwhile Scottish adventurers poured southwards, and obtained in all the walks of life a prosperity which excited much envy, but which was in general only the just reward of prudence and industry.

Nevertheless, Scotland by no means escaped the fate ordained for every country which is connected but not incorporated with another country of greater resources. Though in name an in

dependent kingdom, she was, during more than a century, really treated in many respects as a subject province.

Ireland was undisguisedly governed as a dependency won by the sword. Her rude national institutions had perished.

The English colonists submitted to the dictation of the mother country, without whose support they could not exist, and indemnified themselves by trampling on the people among whom they had settled.

The parliaments which met at Dublin could pass no law which had not previously been approved by the English Privy Council. The authority of the English legislature extended over Ireland.

The executive administration was intrusted to men taken either from England or from the English pale, and in either case regarded as foreigners, and even as enemies, by the Celtic population.

But the circumstance which more than any other has made Ireland to differ from Scotland remains to be noticed.

Scotland was Protestant.

In no part of Europe had the movement of the popular mind against the Roman Catholic Church been so rapid and violent. The reformers had vanquished, deposed, and imprisoned their idolatrous sovereign. They would not endure even such a compromise as had been effected in England.

They had established the Calvinistic doctrine, discipline, and worship, and they made little distinction between popery and prelacy, between the Mass and the Book of Common Prayer.

Unfortunately for Scotland, the prince whom she sent to govern a fairer inheritance had been so much annoyed by the pertinacity with which her theologians had asserted against him the privileges of the synod and the pulpit, that he hated the ecclesiastical polity to which she was fondly attached as much as it was in his effeminate nature to hate anything, and had no

sooner mounted the English throne than he began to show an intolerant zeal for the government and ritual of the English Church.

The Irish were the only people of northern Europe who had remained true to the old religion.

This is to be partly ascribed to the circumstance that they were some centuries behind their neighbours in knowledge. But other causes had co-operated.

The Reformation had been a national as well as a moral revolt.

It had been not only an insurrection of the laity against the clergy, but also an insurrection of all the branches of the great German race against an alien domination.

It is a most significant circumstance that no large society of which the tongue is not Teutonic has ever turned Protestant, and that wherever a language derived from that of ancient Rome is spoken, the religion of modern Rome to this day prevails.

The patriotism of the Irish had taken a peculiar direction. The object of their animosity was not Rome, but England, and they had especial reason to abhor those English sovereigns who had been the chiefs of the great schism, Henry the Eighth and Elizabeth.

During the vain struggle which two generations of Milesian princes maintained against the Tudors, religious enthusiasm and national enthusiasm became inseparably blended in the minds of the vanquished race.

The new feud of Protestant and Papist inflamed the old feud of Saxon and Celt.

The English conquerors meanwhile neglected all legitimate means of conversion.

No care was taken to provide the vanquished nation with instructors capable of making themselves understood.

No translation of the Bible was put forth in the Erse language.

The government contented itself with setting up a vast hierarchy of Protestant archbishops, bishops, and rectors, who did nothing, and who for doing nothing were paid out of the spoils of a Church loved and revered by the great body of the people."

Macaulay has by this style of writing demolished more than one attack that has been directed against the Catholic Church.

As regards historical facts, the infamies perpetrated on the heroic people of Ireland for the space of 300 years under "Protestant civilization" have been frequently exposed by Protestant Englishmen who look back with shame and disgust on the proceedings of their ancestors. Many excellent works on Irish history were published in the year 1875, in connection with the celebration of the O'Connell centenary in Dublin, which throw floods of light on the sufferings. of the people.

2

The Bill for the Emancipation of Catholics throughout Great Britain dates from the year 1829; O'Connell was the first Catholic who sat in the House of Commons at Westminster, and the first Catholic Lord Mayor of Dublin.

See Lecky's "Leaders of Public Opinion in Ireland," page 124. Longmans, London.

2 "History of Ireland," "Life of the Liberator," &c., by Miss Cusack, and others.

Before that time every government that held power in England, whether that of the Tudors, the Stuarts, Cromwell, the Puritans, the House of Orange or that of Hanover, may be said to have striven to emulate the other in brutality and cruelty towards the Irish; the motto of many of them being not only oppression and confiscation of goods, but complete extermination of the population. Cromwell and his unblemished Puritans made themselves particularly remarkable in the work of "civilization," but it will be sufficient for our purpose to recite a few historical facts relating to Ireland.

Elizabeth the Virgin Queen confiscated 600,000 acres, and James I. 2,000,000 acres of Irish soil; the government of the latter also caused a return of landed property in Ireland to be drawn up, to prove that nearly the whole of the country was in actual possession of the Crown, and that Connaught should be held as a fief of the Crown.

Steps of a similar character were taken under Charles I., and the Irish people know with what success. The Cromwellian army of " saints" perpetrated such horrible atrocities throughout the entire country that the remembrance of the maledictions of the sufferers is still extant among the people. The Catho

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