CATHOLIC (ROMAN) EMANCIPATION ACT (10 Geo. IV. c. 7). To render this famous measure intelligible, and still more to convey a conception of its importance to younger readers, it is necessary that we should preface our account of it by a slight sketch of the position of our Roman Catholic fellow-subjects before it was passed. From first to last, the sufferings of the Roman Catholics were the fruit of political tyranny quite as 11111011 as of religious rancour or fanaticism, and their release was effected by a change in the political rather than in the religious views or feelings of the dominant party. The first occasion on which even a promise of a different line of policy from that which had been originally adopted was held out to the Roman Catholics of Ireland, was on the termina tion of the revolutionary war in 1691; and had king William been able to carry out the views which his personal enlightenment and liberality dictated, it is probable that Catho lic emancipation would have been hastened by more than a century. But the English parliament, which was intensely anti-Roman Catholic, enacted, on the 22d of Oct. 1691, that Irish members of both houses should take the oaths of supremacy; and three years later, a set of acts were passed, which placed the Roman Catholics in a worse position than at any previous period of their history. The whole population was disarmed, and the priests banished from the country. But what must have been still more intol erable, was the interference with the private arrangements of their families. All Roman Catholics were prohibited from acting as guardians not only to l'rotestant but to Catho lic children. At a somewhat later date (1704), it was enacted that if a son chose to turn Protestant, he should be entitled to dispossess his father, and at once to take possession of the family estate. Though Catholics were not directly declared incapable of bolding land, they were deprived of the right of acquiring it by purchase, or even by long lease; and if a Catholic chanced to occupy a place in a line of entail, he was passed over in favor of the next Protestant heir. No office of trust, civil or military, was now open to a Cath olic; he was forbidden to vote at elections, to intermarry with a Protestant, or even to dwell in Limerick or Galway, except under certain conditions. But perhaps the most demoralizing provision of all, was that which empowered the son of a Catholic to bring his father into chancery, to force him to declare on oath the value of his property, and to settle such an allowance on Min as the court should determine, not only for the father's life, but tho son's.
Amongst the other burdens of this heavy time, may be mentioned the exclusion of Catholics from the profession of the law, and the regulation that if a Protestant lawyer married a Catholic, he should be held to have gone over to her faith: the prohibition against Catholics acting as schoolmasters, under the penalty of being prosecuted as con victs, by which the whole body was virtually excluded from the benefits of education: and the still more summary enactment, that if a priest celebrated marriage between a Prot estant and a Catholic, he should be hanged. But as years passed away, the memory of the foul deeds of the inquisition and the confessional, and of the other enormities of which Roman Catholics had been guilty in their days of power, waxed fainter; milder feelings began to prevail; and when Grattau appeared as the champion of their rights, the field was already in some degree prepared for his labors. Favored by such influences, of which no one knew better how to avail himself, he succeeded, in 17S0, in carrying, in the Irish parliament, the famous resolution, " that the king's most excellent majesty, and the lords and commons of Ireland, are the only competent power to make laws to bind Ireland." Many of the disqualifying statutes were now repealed, and the claim for complete equality with Englishmen and Protestants, or complete separation from the sister-country, was now formally urged. From this period to the final liberation was achieved, there was no rest. The Irish rebellion of 1798 brought home to the Eng lish nation the dangers to which it would constantly be exposed till the question was finally adjusted. The act of union of 1800 was the immediate consequence of that out break; and to this act the Irish were induced to consent by a virtual pledge entered into by Mr. Pitt, to the effect that the Catholic disabilities should be at once removed. But, like William of Orange, Pitt had pledged himself to more than he was able to accomp lish. The king was seized with scruples regarding the obligations imposed upon him by his coronation oath, and made a vigorous stand against the proposals of his minister.