Democracy and Liberty: In Two Volumes

Chapter 6 (continued)

DemocracyVol2_001-050.indd 1 12/22/11 10:38 AM CHAPTER6 (continued) There is one other subject connected with religious liberty that is likely to occupy a large share in the attention of the democracies of the future. It is the position and the aggressive policy of the Catholic Church. Of all the judgments of the great thinkers of the eighteenth century, none have been more signally falsified than those which they formed of the future of the Catholic Church. With scarcely an exception, they believed that its sacerdotal, superstitious, intolerant, and ultramontane elements were silently fading away; that it was taking more and more the character of a purely moralising influence; and that all danger of antagonism between it and the civil power had passed for ever. The delusion lasted for several years after the French Revolution, and it may be very clearly traced in the speeches and writings of the chief advocates of Catholic Emancipation. Many of them lived to acknowledge their mistake. There is a characteristically cynical saying attributed to Lord Melbourne, that on that question 'all the d d fools in England predicted one set of things, and all the sensible men in England another set, and that the d d fools proved perfectly right, and the sensible men perfectly wrong.' I have been told on excellent authority, that Macaulay once 1 DemocracyVol2_001-050.indd 2 12/22/11 10:38 AM 2 Democracy and Liberty expressed in more decorous language a very similar view. 'I do not mean to take the white sheet,' he is reported to have said, 'for I acted honestly and conscientiously, but I now see that all we did for the Catholics has turned out badly.' The belief that Protestant and Catholic would become almost indistinguishable in the field ofpolitics, and that the association of disaffection with Catholicism was purely casual and ephemeral, has proved ludicrously false, and in Ireland, as on the Continent, the question of priestly influence in politics is one of the most pressing of our time. Looking back with the cheap wisdom which is supplied by the event, it is not difficult to trace the causes of this disappointment . In the comparatively narrow sphere of the United Kingdom, much is to be attributed to a strangely unbroken series of legislative blunders. Strong arguments have been urged in support of the opinion that some legislation resembling the Irish Penal Code against the Catholics was inevitable after the great social and political convulsions of the Revolution ; but two parts of these laws had an evil influence of the most profound and enduring kind. The laws forbidding Catholics to purchase or inherit land, or to acquire lasting and profitable land-tenures, had the effect of producing in Ireland the most dangerous of class divisions; while the laws preventing or restricting Catholic education reduced the Catholic population to a far lower level of civilisation than their Protestant countrymen. When, at last, the hour of emancipation struck, the difficult task was most unskilfully accomplished. By the Irish Act of 1793 the vast ignorant Catholic democracy were granted votes for which they were utterly unfit, while the intelligent and loyal Catholic gentry were still excluded from Parliament, and thus prevented from exercising over their poorer co-religionists the guiding and restraining influence which was pre-eminently wanting. The education of the priests was equally mismanaged. There was a moment when it would have been quite possible to connect a seminary for the special education of priests with Dublin University, and thus to secure for the teachers of the DemocracyVol2_001-050.indd 3 12/22/11 10:38 AM English Policy Towards Catholics 3 Irish people a high level of secular education, and close and friendly connection with their Protestant contemporaries. If this course had been adopted, and if it had been combined with a State payment of the priests, the whole complexion of later Irish history might have been changed. But the opportunity was neglected. The priests were left wholly dependent on the dues of their people, and they were educated, apart from all the great secular influences of their time, in a separate seminary, which soon became a hotbed of disloyalty and of obscurantism. Then followed the shameful frustration of Catholic hopes at the time of Lord Fitzwilliam, and of the Union, which left a deep stain upon the good faith of the Government , and added immensely to Catholic disloyalty...