who had retained their lands.[1] With but few exceptions it was the landless men who followed the path of the wild geese.
The penal laws aimed at keeping the Catholic interest in the depressed position in which the last confiscation had left it. It has often been said that these laws were provoked by if not modelled on the anti-Protestant enactments of Louis XIV. But the French penal laws stopped short at the Vosges. The Protestant noble or burgher or peasant of Alsace was not injured in pocket or in conscience by his foreign rulers. The result was that barely four generations had passed before Alsace, differing entirely in language, and largely in religion from France, yet had become one with her in sentiment. To the young Goethe Strassburg and the adjoining countryside appeared German in all outward characteristics and very largely so in mental ones. Yet nowhere in his account of his Strassburg days does he give any hint of the existence of any hostility to France, of any desire for reunion with Germany.
And in the same age an Irish peer. Viscount in Ireland, Count Taaffe in Austria could assert that neither was Protestantism any bar to advancement under Maria Theresa, nor Catholicism under her rival, Frederick the Great. And he drew the moral that it was not Ireland so much as England which suffered from the effect of the restrictive legislation in Ireland.
- ↑ Swift, writing in 1725 says, according to Froude: "The Papists in general of any substance or estate, and the priests almost universally are what we call Whigs in the general sense of the term."
