PENAL LAWS,

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXVI, Issue 24, 20 October 1898, Page 2

PENAL LAWS,

-which bound the nation like a galling iron chain. Among its provisions were the Navigation Acts which prohibited direct trade between Ireland and the British colonies, so that as Dean Swift said, Ireland's splendid ports were of no more use to her ■ than a beautiful prospect is to a man shut up in a dungeon.' The religious disabilities of the day are inconceivable to us at the present time. They compelled the Presbyterians of the North to seek religious freedom in America. Catholics fared even worse. It was penal for them to send their children to a Catholic school either at home or abroad ; penal to have a horse of thevsilueof £f> or over. The penal code destroyed the woolen tra le, punished industry as a crime, and, as O'Connell remarked, 'punished the acquisition of knowledge as a felony.' hdmuml Burke says that 'it was a complete system, full of (ohcronce and consistency, well digested and well disposed iv all ita parts. It was 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 preceded from the perverted ingenuity of man.' Dr. Johnson says that it was worse than the pLigues of Egypt. This is the crime of which Mr. Stead speaks as having its oriym in the centuries preceding 170 S. Parliament was blind to the people's maddening wrongs. No wonder, then, as Mitchell says, that people's minds turned away from Parliament towards plans of a revolutionary character. True