After Limerick
as Ireland is at the present day, not even the lowest section of her population is sunk in the dreadful misery which prevailed among the Irish poor in Swift's time.
And even domestic happiness was not left to the Catholics, the one consolation their life might have afforded them. One of the objects of the Penal Laws was to keep in ignorance four-fifths of the child population of Ireland, unless they chose to avail themselves of the Protestant charter schools. The society which managed these schools proposed to Catholic parents to take their starving children between the ages of six and ten, to feed, clothe, and lodge them gratuitously, to give them a free education and an industrial training, to apprentice the boys and get the girls situations. But the condition was that the children were to be educated as Protestants and that they were never to communicate with their parents. At first children were sent to the charter schools in times of famine and general distress and then in better times taken away. So a law was made providing that once a child was in one of those schools he could not be withdrawn. Children were always sent to schools in a different province from that in which their parents lived, and the society were empowered to take up children between the ages of
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