After Limerick
take the Abjuration oath before March 25th, 1710, under pain of "præmunire."
The Penal Code was now practically complete, and the Irish House of Commons passed a Resolution that persecuting and informing against Papists was an honourable service to the Government.34 Surely it would be difficult to find in all the annals of history as demoralising a code of laws as this Irish Penal Code. In other European countries religious persecution may have been more ferocious, but in Ireland, where the motive for persecution was, on the whole, rather political than religious, the Penal Laws were more subtly degrading, and more injurious to the national character than the more bloodthirsty enactments of France and Spain against the Protestants. Families were divided against families, brothers against brothers, sons became the enemies of their own fathers. The trade of informer became an honourable and lucrative one and flourished exceedingly. An entire Catholic nation was required by an alien power to give up the faith of its forefathers, drive out its ministers of religion, and become hypocrites and liars under pain of perpetual poverty, if not of perpetual imprisonment. Needless to say, no laws which aimed at the coercion of an entire nation could ever be enforced in all their verbal
329
