So great was the enforced exodus of priests from Ireland, at this awful period of its history, that, says McGee, “in Rome 72,000 francs annually were allotted for the maintenance of the fugitive Irish clergy, and, during the first three months of 1699, three remittances from the Holy Father, amounting to 90,000 livres, were placed in the hands of the Nuncio at Paris for the temporary relief of the fugitives in France and Flanders. It may also be added here that, till the end of the eighteenth century, an annual charge of 1,000 crowns was borne by the Papal treasury for the encouragement of Catholic poor schools in Ireland.”
Of the penal code which produced this dreadful condition of affairs, in and out of Ireland, Dr. Samuel Johnson, the great English scholar and philosopher, said, “They are more grievous than all the Ten Pagan persecutions of the Christians.”
Edmund Burke, the illustrious Irish statesman, who passed most of his career in the British Parliament, and was, of course, a Protestant, or he could not have sat there, denounced them, substantially, as the most diabolical engine of oppression and demoralization ever used against a people or ever devised by “the perverted ingenuity of man.”
And the Protestant and English historian, Godkin, who compiled Cassell’s “History of Ireland,” for English readers, says of the penal laws: “The eighteenth century was the era of persecution in which the law did the work of the sword, more effectually and more safely. There was established a code framed with almost diabolical ingenuity, to extinguish natural affection, to foster perfidy and hypocrisy, to petrify conscience, to perpetuate brutal ignorance, to facilitate the work of tyranny, by rendering the vices of slavery inherent and natural in the Irish character, and to make Protestantism almost irredeemably odious as the monstrous incarnation of all moral perversions.” This honest Englishman grows indignant when he says, in continuation, “Too well did it accomplish its deadly work on the intellects, morals, and physical condition of a people, sinking in degeneracy from age to age, till all manly spirit, all virtuous sense of personal independence and responsibility, was nearly extinct, and the very features, vacant, timid, cunning, and unreflective, betrayed the crouching slave within.... Having no rights or franchises, no legal protection of life and property, disqualified to handle a gun, even as a common soldier or a gamekeeper, forbidden to acquire the elements of knowledge at home or abroad, forbidden even to render to God what conscience dictated as His due, what could the Irish be but abject serfs? What nation in their circumstances could have been otherwise? Is it not amazing that any social virtue could have survived such an ordeal?—that any seeds of good, any roots of national greatness, could have outlived such a long and tempestuous winter?”
But the seeds of good, although chilled, did not decay, and the manly spirit of the Old Irish race—the Celto-Norman stock, with the former element in preponderance—survived all its persecutions, and
“—Exiled in those penal days,
Its banners over Europe blaze!”
The great American orator and philanthropist, Wendell Phillips, lecturing on Ireland, and alluding to the enforced ignorance of a former period, said: “When the old-time ignorance of the Catholic Irish people is reproachfully alluded to by the thoughtless, or illiberal, it is not Ireland but England that should bow her head in the dust and put on sackcloth and ashes!”