its members and dependents, was termed the Church of the nation. Others existed only on sufferance. The conditions of their existence were prescribed by the members of the dominant sect. Free-thinkers were punished for blasphemous libel. Dissenting Christians, whether Protestant or Catholic, were excluded in different degrees from public life. Persecution of an active sort was at this date very rare, and Dissenters, at any rate, enjoyed a qualified legal immunity. The Test and Corporation Acts, passed in the reign of Charles II, were still in force, and bound practically every public officer to take the sacrament according to the rites of the Church of England. As a Liberal Churchman of the time put it, "The Saviour of the world instituted the Eucharist in commemoration of His death—an event so tremendous that afflicted Nature hid herself in darkness; but the British Legislature has made it a qualification for gauging beer-barrels and soap-boilers' tubs, for writing Custom-House dockets and debentures, and for seizing smuggled tea."[[53]] But breaches of these Acts were regularly committed, and were regularly covered by the passing of an annual Act of Indemnity. The Catholics were in much worse case. A whole code of penal laws had been contrived against them in the reign of William III, and in Ireland, where three-fourths of the people were Catholics, the code had been a fearful engine of oppression. Catholics were by these laws excluded, not only from Parliament and public offices, but from the Army and Navy and the legal profession. A Catholic could not have a priest as his private chaplain. He could not send his children to be educated abroad. He could not inherit land. He could not own horses above a certain value. The exclusions were still absolute in 1760. The grosser interferences with private liberty were, like the Acts against Dissenters, not commonly enforced, though so late as 1793 a zealous Scottish Protestant claimed his right to tender a Protestant oath to a Catholic landowner, and, on his refusal, to take possession of his estate.[[54]] But such enjoyments as were possessed by the members of these inferior Churches, including the deliberate
mitigations of the existing law, were concessions from their superiors. All was a matter of permission and connivance, and not of right. It was the benevolence of masters which they had to acknowledge, and not the association of equals. "It is idle to hope," said Castlereagh in 1801, "that Dissenters of any description can ever be so zealously attached subjects as those who are of the established religion; but the question is, what system, without hazarding the powers of the State itself, is best calculated, if not warmly to attach, at least to disarm the hostility of those classes in the community who cannot be got rid of, and must be governed?" Pitt, eleven years earlier, displayed less insolence, but was as firmly opposed to any idea of equality between sects. "The Dissenters had a right to enjoy their liberty and property; to entertain their own speculative opinions, and to educate their offspring in such religious principles as they approve. But the indispensable necessity of a certain permanent church establishment, for the good of the state, required that toleration should not be extended to an equality.... He had no idea of such levelling principles as those which warranted to all citizens an equality of rights."[[55]] This is the essence of Toryism, to grant to others such indulgences as we think fit, and to retain the consciousness of our own superior worth and power, even while we refrain from abusing them.
Within the borders of Great Britain the Tory philosophy was expressed most crudely and practised most universally in the relations of men and women. Women were made only for those purposes which they could fulfil in connection with men. They must be trained only in those qualities which men required in them, irrespective of their own varying capacities and dispositions. They must not engage in any occupation where they might compete with men. Their political conditions were prescribed by men. Even the moral rules which regulated their private conduct were settled by men, who degraded the wretched prostitute while they permitted themselves the indulgence which produced her downfall. When a woman married a man her real
property passed to him for his life and her personal property absolutely, and the subordination of her judgment to his, enjoined upon her by the marriage service, was secured by this deprivation of her economic independence. "The profession of ladies," said Mrs. Hannah More, "to which the bent of their instruction should be turned, is that of daughters, wives, mothers, and mistresses of families."[[56]] "Men," said Mrs. Barbauld, "have various departments in life; women have but one.... It is, to be a wife, a mother, a mistress of a family."[[57]] Association with a man being the beginning and end of a woman's course of life, her whole mind was to be trained, not according to her capacities, but according to what a man would want of her. Almost every contemporary treatise on the education of women emphasizes the necessity of suppressing the woman's intellect in the presence of the man's. "If you have any learning," said Dr. Gregory in a very popular work, "keep it a profound secret, especially from the men, who generally look with a jealous and malignant eye on a woman of great parts and a cultivated understanding."[[58]] "Young ladies," said Mrs. Barbauld, "ought only to have such a general tincture of knowledge as to make them agreeable companions to a man of sense,"[[59]] and she persuaded Mrs. Elizabeth Montagu to abandon her scheme of endowing a women's college. Toryism has never elsewhere been so remorseless in warping nature to its own prejudices, and no slave was ever more carefully trained to intellectual feebleness and triviality, or more carefully educated in submission and docility towards his master, than was the ordinary young English lady of the end of the eighteenth century.[[60]]
If this was the general atmosphere of feminine education, it is not difficult to understand the ferocious contempt which was poured upon Mary Wollstonecraft, who suggested that women should even take part in affairs of State. Even Fox, who came nearer to
pure Liberalism than almost any of his contemporaries, spoke with derision of Woman Suffrage.[[61]] After the great war with France, demonstrations of the working classes in favour of Reform were frequently attended by women. This drew from Castlereagh a coarse and brutal condemnation. Speaking in favour of his Six Acts, which were intended for the suppression of these popular demonstrations, he said: "There was one point on which he should propose no law; it was the part which women had borne in the late transactions, for he trusted that it would be sufficient to restrain them from similar conduct in future, to let them know that when the French republicans were carrying on their bloody orgies, they could find no female to join them except by ransacking the bagnios and public brothels. He was happy that no female had attended any public meeting in the metropolis. Such a drama would, he trusted, be put an end to by the innate decorum and the innate sense of modesty which the women in this country possessed, and which would purge the country of this disgrace."[[62]] Castlereagh was an honest and chivalrous man according to the standards of his time. But which showed the greater appreciation of the real worth of woman, and the greater respect for her real interest, the workman who permitted her to take an active part in political affairs, or the nobleman who hinted that if she so much as showed herself at a public meeting, she was no better than a whore?
Eighteenth-century Toryism was less definitely extended beyond the boundaries of Great Britain than is its modern equivalent. The conception of a nation as a unit in human society had little weight in politics until after the French Revolution. Before that great event the mass of a people was regarded more as an appendage to the titular head of the State than as an aggregate of human beings with claims to control their lives without foreign interference. It was only when nations came to be regarded as collections of individual men and women, whose individual security and happiness were the first objects of their government, and no longer as mere lumps of weight in the
balance of power, that the independence of a nation became an important thing in itself. The revolt of the American Colonies, which fired the train of modern Liberalism, was an assertion not only of individual rights as against government, but of the rights of one homogeneous and self-contained community against another. But Toryism had a more ancient and a more thorough experience in Ireland. A clearer example of the egoistic use of one nation by another could hardly be found in history. From the day when the first English raiders descended upon the Irish coast down to the day when George III ascended the throne the paramount object of the English Government in Ireland had been the maintenance of English and not of Irish interests. It was no longer a case of subjugation and forcible repression. But it was still a case of conscious and deliberate employment of the territory and resources of a conquered people for the benefit of the conquerors. The Irish were left the semblance of freedom, but they were so hedged round with limitations and qualifications that they would have resented slavery no more bitterly. The strength of their limbs served only to aggravate the fretting of their chains. They had a Parliament which could legislate only as the English Parliament allowed. They could engage in industry, but only in such industries as the English Government, ever jealous for the English manufacturer, permitted. They could make goods for export, but the English Government kept the most lucrative branches of foreign and colonial trade for its own people, and practically confined the Irish to supplying such goods as it required for its own domestic consumption. Englishmen owned land in Ireland, and spent the rents in England. English clergy owned cures in Ireland, and did their duties by deputy. The whole system was absentee, and the fate of Ireland was always decided abroad.
But the worst of the grievances of the Irish were the penal laws against Catholics, by which racial and religious Toryism combined to deprive of property and exclude from public life, not a sect, but almost an entire people. Of all the instruments of foreign tyranny, religious disabilities are the most hateful, and
if economic abuses did more to impoverish the Irish, the penal laws did most to poison their temper. The Irishman's enemy pursued him into his most private heart, and as the wound was deepest, so the resentment was most fierce. The laws were not enforced so mercilessly as they had been fifty years before. But they remained on the Statute Book, and kept alive the memories of the more active persecutions of the past. The whole nation was thus aggrieved. The Protestants suffered no less than the Catholics from the legislative and commercial grievances, and if the religious disabilities tended to sunder the dominant caste from the rest of the people, both sects tended to forget their mutual hostility in their hatred of the common enemy. Towards the end of the century a few English statesmen foresaw the inevitable explosion, and urged that the recognition of Irish nationality was the only way to establish good Irish government. Not even an Irish Parliament could work if it was closed to the vast majority of the people. "The Catholics," said Fox, "are no longer a party. The parties now to be dreaded in Ireland are, on the one hand, a few people holding places of great emolument, and supporting corruption and abuses; and, on the other, the Irish nation.... I no longer apprehend any danger to Ireland from disputes between the Catholics and the Protestants; what I apprehend is the alienation of the whole Irish people from the English Government."[[63]] "God never intended one country to govern another," said Shelburne, "but that each country should govern itself."[[64]] "In a mighty empire," said Dr. Laurence, "which enjoyed the blessing of a free constitution pervading the whole, where two independent Parliaments existed, that which was the more illustrious and exalted in character, in authority, and in jurisdiction, he should have expected, would have felt it to be its peculiar duty to cultivate, protect, and foster in the other, whatever could be there discovered of the true parliamentary spirit. And what was that spirit? A zealous attachment of each and all to their proper constitution, a conscious sense of their own