patronage remained as before, either directly or indirectly, in English
hands. If it was no longer manipulated in ways frankly corrupt, it was
manipulated in a fashion just as deleterious to Ireland. Before, as
after, the Union there was no public career in Ireland for an Irishman
who was in sympathy with the great majority of his countrymen. To win
the prizes of public life, judgeships, official posts, and the rest, it
was not absolutely necessary to be a Protestant, though for a long time
all important offices were held exclusively, and are still held mainly,
by Protestants; but it was absolutely necessary to be a thoroughgoing
supporter of the Ascendancy, and in thoroughgoing hostility to Irish
public opinion as a whole. In other words, the unwritten Penal Code was
preserved after the abolition of the written enactments, and was used
for precisely the same pernicious purpose. It was a subtle and sustained
attempt "to debauch the intellect of Ireland," as Mr. Locker-Lampson
puts it, to denationalize her, and to make her own hands the instrument
of her humiliation. The Bar was the principal sufferer, because now, as
before, it was the principal road to humiliation. Fitzgibbons
multiplied, so that for generations after the Union some of the ablest
Irish lawyers were engaged in the hateful business of holding up their
own people to execration in the eyes of the world, of combating
legislation imperatively needed for Ireland, and of framing and carrying
into execution laws which increased the maladies they were intended to
allay.

Let nobody think these phenomena are peculiar to Ireland. In many parts
of the world where Ascendancies have existed, or exist, the same methods
are employed, and always with a certain measure of success. Irish moral
fibre was at least as tough as that of any other nationality in
resisting the poison.