immediate defiance of a solemn pledge given in the Treaty of Limerick,
guaranteeing liberty of conscience to the Catholics, and perfected in
the reign of Anne. This Code, ostensibly framed to extirpate
Catholicism, was primarily designed to confirm and perpetuate the
gigantic dislocation of property caused by the transference of Irish and
Anglo-Irish land into English and Scotch ownership. Since the rightful
owners were Catholic, and the wrongful owners Protestants, the laws
against the Catholic religion--a religion feared everywhere by
Englishmen at this period--were the simplest means of legalizing and
buttressing the new régime. I shall not linger over the details of the
Code. Burke's description of it remains classic and unquestioned: "A
complete system full of coherence and consistency, well digested and
composed in all its parts ... a machine of wise and elaborate
contrivance; and as well fitted for the oppression, impoverishment and
degradation of a people, and the debasement in them of human nature
itself, as ever proceeded from the perverted ingenuity of man."

The aim was to reduce the Catholics to poverty, ignorance, and
impotence, and the aim was successful. Of the laws against priests,
worship, education, and of the bars to commerce and the professions, I
need not speak. In the matter of property, the fundamental enactments
concerned the land, namely, that no Catholic could own land, or lease it
for more than thirty years, and even then on conditions which made
profitable tenure practically impossible. This law created and sustained
the serfdom I have described, and is the direct cause of the modern land
problem. It remained unaltered in the smallest respect for seventy
years, that is, until 1761, when a Catholic was permitted to lease for
sixty-one years as much as fifty acres of bog not less than four feet
deep. Long before this the distribution of landed property and the
system of land tenure had become stereotyped.