annual shiploads of families poured themselves out from Belfast and Londonderry. The resentment which they carried with them continued to burn in their new homes; and, in the War of Independence, England had no fiercer enemies than the grandsons and great-grandsons of the Presbyterians who had held Ulster against Tyrconnell. The Irish Council were startled at the dimensions which the Exodus assumed. The worst of it,' wrote Archbishop Boulter, 'is, that it carries off only Protestants, and reigns chiefly in the North.'1 Parliament ordered an inquiry and heard evidence, as if it was some inexplicable mystery. An official report distinctly stated, that the Test was at least one of the causes.2 The ministers reminded the Government that, when the Test clause was first passed, an early repeal of it was promised; the promise had not been kept, and the hardships under which their people laboured on that account were so grievous, that they were transporting themselves to America for the sake of the liberty and ease which they were denied in their native country.' Still the Irish Parliament could not bring itself to recognize its own folly. The Duke of Newcastle, in 1732, intended to make another effort. A bill was sent over for the more effectual disarming of the Catholics and as the Test had been imposed by a clause introduced in England into a Catholic penal bill, the Duke thought it might be removed by a similar manœuvre. He consulted Archbishop Boulter who was then Primate. But Boulter, though himself wishing the Dis 3 Address of the Protestant Ministers of the South of Ireland, 1729. Ibid. СНАР. III. 1732 BOOK 1732 senters well, warned him that he would fail. Times were changed, he said. There was less irritation against Popery, and more anger against England. A clause introduced by the English Cabinet would, on that account, alone be rejected by the patriots of the Lower House. The clergy would oppose it to a man; they were so bitter that the Whig Bishops sent from England could hardly restrain them from railing against Dissent in their sermons. 'Dean Swift' was already in the field, and had sounded the alarm.' The thing could not be done.1 'It is indeed extraordinary,' Newcastle replied, 'that such a clause should be liable to meet with difficulties in either House in a country where no distinctions should be kept up among Protestants, which might be the occasion of disuniting them.'' Extraordinary it might be, but it was a fact which could not be changed.3 The young, And so the emigration continued. the courageous, the energetic, the earnest, those alone among her colonists who, if Ireland was ever to be a Protestant country could be effective missionaries, were torn up by the roots, flung out, and bid find a home elsewhere; and they found a home to which England fifty years later had to regret that she had allowed them to be driven. Singular complication! First a Protestant exodus to America, and then a Catholic from the same country. Each emigrant, and each class of emigrants, carrying away in his heart a sense of intolerable wrong, and a hungry craving for revenge. 1 The Primate to the Duke of Newcastle, January 4 and 15, 1732. MSS. Record Office. 6 2 Newcastle to the Primate, February 5, 1732.' Ibid. 3The Primate to the Duke of Newcastle, February 19.' SECTION V. THE responsibility for the mismanagement of Ireland must be divided equally between England and the Irish colony. With a perversity of misunderstanding, whatever salutary measure England recommended the Irish Parliament thwarted. When the Irish Parliament saw their way clearly, England was wilfully blind, or deliberately cruel. With their shipping destroyed by the Navigation Act, their woollen manufactures taken from them, their trade in all its branches crippled and confined, the single recourse left to those of the Irish who still nourished dreams of improving the unfortunate country was agriculture. The soil, at least, was their own; a soil which needed only to be drained, cleared of weeds, and manured, to produce grasscrops and corn-crops as rich as the best in England. Here was employment for a population three times more numerous than as yet existed. Here was a prospect, if not of commercial wealth, yet of substantial comfort and material abundance. The Irish peasant was indolent. The glorification of idleness, the contempt of work as base and ignoble, had been instilled into him for fifty generations, and was in the granules of his blood. The earth-tillers everywhere had been the drudges of the tribewretches too mean for the honourable employments of stealing and murdering; and of the fruits of their ignominious toil they had been allowed no more by their own chiefs, than sufficed to keep them alive. CHAP. III. 1716 BOOK II. 1716 The Elizabethan landlords had been scarcely lighter masters. The peasants sowed the crop for the masters to reap; and it was not till the Puritans broke in upon the pleasant ways of the old oppressors, and instead of the sword of tyranny ruled Ireland with a sword of justice, that any labourer could call his work his own. The reign of Charles the Second, while the Cromwellians were still in the land, was looked back upon in the following century as an island of prosperity in the ocean of general wretchedness. In Charles the Second's time the absentees were few. The huge estates had not yet devoured the smaller allotments, nor the plough and peasant's spade been laid by to rust, while the bogs crept back over the meadows which the Cromwellians had reclaimed. The poor Irish were brought for a generation into the same condition with their fellow labourers in other parts of the world, and they had the same encouragement to industry. But the change was too shortlived to alter a type which had been moulded by centuries of injustice. The Puritan farmers, under the pressure of Jeremy Taylor and his brother bishops, sold their holdings. Tyrconnell and Catholic ascendancy broke up the scattered Protestant establishments, destroyed their stock, and threw the country into a wilderness again. Many never came back to resume their profitless task, and the land jobbing finished the ruin which the war had left incomplete. Whole counties fell into the hands of favourites or speculators; and the management was left to middlemen, who again pared the peasant to the bone. The trade in butter and salt meat, which England had graciously consented to leave, with the vast profits, of which 1 I shall speak elsewhere, to be made out of wool once more Ireland was roughly guessed at a CHAP. III. 1716 |