freehold gave a vote. That was a matter of slight importance in
England, as the number of small freeholders was limited, land being
usually let for a term of years. In Ireland, however, the ordinary
arrangement was for peasants to hold their scraps of land for life;
and land having recently increased in value enormously, a large
proportion of these were of the value of forty shillings. Hence, the
whole constituency would be altered; thousands of new electors, all of
them poor and illiterate, would be added in many constituencies;
and the representation of the country would at once pass into Roman
Catholic hands. To fix a higher qualification for Roman Catholics than
for Protestants would be not to abolish but to perpetuate the Penal
Laws; to deprive the existing voters of the franchise was out of the
question; hence the franchise was granted but not without considerable
hesitation on the part of the more thoughtful members. On the other
hand it was urged with great force that to give these privileges to
the uneducated mass but to continue the disabilities of the Roman
Catholic gentry by not allowing them to sit in Parliament was absurd.
The proposal to abolish the religious test in the case of Members of
Parliament was, however, defeated.

Looking back, with the light of later history to aid us, it is
interesting to see how much more correct were Lord Clare's predictions
of the future than Grattan's. Grattan (as I have already explained),
taking his ideas from his lay friends among the cultured classes, and
seeing the decline of the Papal influence on the continent, considered
that anyone who regarded Popery as a political influence of the future
totally misunderstood the principles which then governed human action;
for controverted points of religion (such as belief in the Real
Presence) had ceased to be a principle of human action. He maintained
that the cause of the Pope, as a political force, was as dead as that