In less than eight months from the commencement of the war their leaders admit that they are completely vanquished, and debate the necessity of at once abandoning the struggle and expatriating themselves to seek better fortune abroad. This defeat was accomplished by the Ulster Protestants absolutely unaided, and, alone, amounts to a demonstration that Temple's statement does not remotely approach to truth.

4. If that statement were near the truth, Ulster ought to be by far the least Protestant province of Ireland. It has ever been, however, since James's plantation, and is now, by far the most Protestant.

5. The preposterous discrepancies as to the amount of murder and massacre, from 300,000 to 5,000 lives, throw discredit on the testimony of each witness. *

6. While Cromwell's courts-martial condemned to death 200 individuals in the other three provinces, in which no general massacre of Protestants was ever alleged, in Ulster, where a massacre throwing into the shade the Sicilian Vespers and the massacre of St. Bartholomew was perpetrated, one man, Sir Phelim O'Neill, was found guilty and executed.

IX.

My most earnest and anxious desire and hope is that a real and affectionate union between Great Britain

* See Appendix.

and Ireland may be accomplished; not the false union of 1801, brought about notoriously by the most scandalous bribery and corruption, equally disgraceful to the bribers and the bribed; and which has been for seventy-eight years justly regarded, by an immense majority of the Irish people, as one of their worst wrongs. A true union between the two countries is the common interest of both. I am confident this will be slowly but certainly secured by the dogged perseverance on the part of England in the complete reversal of her policy in the government of Ireland, adopted since 1829-unmoved by the brainless and contemptible yet provoking tactics of each crop of trading Irish patriots. Indeed I am satisfied much progress has been already made towards this consummation.

My parting counsel to my dear Celtic brethren is this:-"Let Erin remember the days. of old," but with the special object to contrast the oppressions of old with the benefits conferred upon her by the old oppressor since 1829. They are too numerous to be specified here. I will mention three or four of them.

(1) The Irish National Education, perfectly free from any just suspicion of tampering with the religious belief of any sect-offering an excellent education, availed of at present, more or less completely, by upwards of 1,000,000 of children, and supported by a parliamentary grant of £651,091. Contrast with

this the system supported by Parliament from 1747 to
about 1825-the Charter Schools, of which there was
one for each county. About 1,400 children were
lodged, fed, clothed, and educated in these schools, on
condition that they should be brought up Protestants.
In 1784 the truly great and excellent Howard visited
Ireland for the purpose of enquiring into the condition
of the prisons. He chanced to inspect some of these
schools, and was so shocked by what he witnessed that‍
he used his influence to procure a parliamentary
inquiry into their management.
The committee

appointed to inquire reported that

"The children were sickly, pale, and such miserable objects that they were a disgrace to all society; that their reading had been neglected for the purpose of making them work for their masters; that they were in general filthy and ill-clothed, without shifts or shirts, and in such a situation as it was indecent to look on; the diet was insufficient for their support; and in general they had the itch, and other eruptive disorders." The grant, they said accordingly, was expended--

"For the purpose of imprisoning, starving, beating, diseasing, destroying the natural affections, and letting the understanding run to waste of 1,400 poor children annually, under the pretence of instructing and converting the young generation."

(2) The Encumbered Estates Act, by which the ruined Irish landlords were swept off and replaced by successors who possessed at least the ability to do their duty by their estates and tenants.

Freplaced the
Greedy m

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(3) The Poor-law, before the enactment of which the destitute were mainly supported by the poor.davon. Now the landlord, who contributed little, and thestimice absentee, who seldom contributed at all, are obliged to contribute in proportion to their means.

(4) The Parliamentary Grant for the relief of the sufferers by the Famine of 1846-7, to an amount exceeding what in the world's history was ever bestowed in a similar calamity by any nation for the relief of its own starving people.

(5) The Act for the Reform of the Irish Municipal Corporations. These corporations had been strongholds of Orange or high Tory Protestant ascendancy till now. Roman Catholics had, indeed, been made eligible to them during the English scare occasioned by the revolutionary proceedings in France; but for forty-seven years after not one Roman Catholic had been elected to the Dublin Corporation. Now they are not only eligible but elected everywhere.

(6) The Act for the Disestablishment and Disendowment of the Established Church of Ireland—worth, with reference to the pacification of Ireland, more than all the rest.

You are too sharp-witted, my dear fellow-countrymen, not to know that the last will-o'-the-wisp lighted for you by the Home-Rulers is a fraud. You know as well as I do that nine out of ten of these patriots care not at all for Home-Rule but as a means of attaining to

separation from Great Britain, which is at the bottom of their hearts. Such separation, you are quite aware, could only be effected by force, and where is the force to effect it? You do not yet know the force you would have to overcome to compel the separation, but your children will know it. The British Empire has about a sixth part of the land-surface of the whole earth, and nearly a fifth of the population of the world under her dominion, not to mention that "Britannia rules the waves." Within the last fifty years the population of England has doubled-Ireland's, within the same time, has fallen off above two millions. Her present population is not twice that of London alone. A few years ago the United Kingdom crushed a rebellion, at a distance of several thousand miles, of 50,000 well disciplined and well armed infantry, horse, and artillery; and two absurdly called Irish rebellions, one in a cabbage-garden, the other at a few police-stations, with a handful of Constabulary. England cannot and certainly will not ever permit the noble Cork harbour to be converted into a Franco-Irish or Yanko-Irish naval station, with a Sebastabolic fortress at its entrance.

The result of the Irish National Education will before very long make every young Irish peasant, nay every young Irish woman, acquainted with these and other such facts; and then, alas for the gasconade of the trading Irish sham patriot! or, if he ventures still