the same fashion. There was a vigorous opposition on the part, not so much of the outer Irish as of Protestants settled in Ireland, and a futile insurrection under Robert Emmet in 1803. Dublin, which had been a fine Anglo-Irish city in the middle eighteenth century, was gradually deserted by its intellectual and political life, and invaded by the outer Irish of Ireland. Its fashionable life became more and more official, centring upon the Lord Lieutenant in Dublin Castle; its chief social occasion is now a horse show. But while the Ireland of Swift and Goldsmith was part and lot with the England of Pope, Dr. Johnson, and Sir Joshua Reynolds, while there has never been and is not now any real definable difference except one of geography between the "governing class" in Ireland and in Britain, the Irish underworld and the English underworld were essentially dissimilar. The upward struggle of the English "democracy" to education, to political recognition, had no Irish counterpart. Britain was producing a great industrial population, Protestant or sceptical; she had agricultural labourers indeed, but no peasants. Ireland had become a land of peasants, blankly ignorant and helplessly priest-ridden. Their cultivation degenerated more and more into a growing of potatoes and a feeding of pigs. The people married and bred; except for the consumption of whisky when it could be got, and a little fighting, family life was their only amusement. This was the direct result of orthodox Catholic teaching; the priests were all-powerful with the people and they taught them nothing; not even washing or drainage; they forbade them to seek any Protestant learning, they allowed their agricultural science to sink to mere potato-growing, and they preyed upon their poverty. Here are the appalling consequences. The population of Ireland
in 1785 was 2,845,932,
in 1803 was 5,536,594,
in 1845 was 8,295,061,
at which date the weary potato gave way under its ever-growing burthen and there was a frightful famine. Many died, many emigrated, especially to the United States; an outflow of emigration began that made Ireland for a time a land of old people and empty nests.
Now because of the Union of the Parliaments, the enfranchise-
