In only one, which Froude has described at much length, did the criminal try to make a Protestant girl attend mass.

For one of the cases, which according to Froude went unpunished, two men were hanged.

"The truth is," says Lecky, "that the crime was merely the natural product of a state of great lawlessness and barbarism."* These offences have so completely disappeared from Ireland that even the memory of them has perished, and yet Ireland remains as Catholic as ever.

Arthur Young, who denounces them as scandalous to a civilised community, does not hint that they had anything to do with religion, nor were they ever cited in defence of the penal code.
Froude was led astray by religious prejudice, and forgot for once the historian in the advocate.

The penal codes were rather the cause than the effect of crime and outrage in Ireland.