though in a county I believe not very populous.'1 Skelton, a Protestant clergyman of considerable literary talents, and of great energy and benevolence of character, who was then officiating at Monaghan, wrote at the close of the famine a very remarkable letter on the necessity of tillage and granaries,' which he looked upon as the sole means of in some degree preventing a recurrence of the calamity. He tells us it was computed by some, and perhaps not without reason, that as many people died of want, or of disorders occasioned by want, within the two years past as fell by the sword in the massacre and rebellion of 1641. Whole parishes in some places were almost desolate; the dead have been eaten in the fields by dogs for want of people to bury them. Whole thousands in a barony have perished, some of hunger and others of disorders occasioned by unnatural, unwholesome, and putrid diet.' 2

'By a moderate computation,' said another writer who lived in the county of Tipperary, very near onethird part of the poor cottiers of Munster have perished by fevers, fluxes, and downright want;' and he described with a terrible energy the scenes which he witnessed around his own dwelling. The charity of the landlords and farmers is almost quite exhausted. Multitudes have perished, and are daily perishing under hedges and ditches-some by fevers, some by fluxes, and some through downright cruel want in the utmost agonies of despair. I have seen the labourer endeavouring to work at his spade, but fainting for want of food, and forced to quit it. I have seen the aged father eating grass like a beast, and in the anguish of his soul wishing for his dissolution. I have seen the helpless orphan exposed on the dunghill, and none to take him in for fear of infection; and I have seen the hungry infant sucking at the

1 Fraser's Life of Berkeley, p. 265.

Skelton's Works, v. 352.

breast of the already expired parent.'1 Primate Boulter exhibited in this wretched period an admirable example of charity; hundreds were daily fed by the Archbishop of Cashel, by Mr. Damer, by the authorities of Trinity College, and by some others; and a few obelisks still remain which were built at this time to give employment to the poor,2 but the country was so drained of its wealth that but little could be done. The cottiers depended wholly on their potato plots, and when these failed they died by thousands. In the county of Kerry the collectors of hearth-money in 1733 returned the number of families paying the tax at 14,346. In 1744 it had sunk to 9,372, about a third part having disappeared.3

It will be observed that the conduct of England in destroying the trade and the most important manufacture of Ireland was a much less exceptional proceeding than Irish writers are disposed to maintain. England did to Ireland little more than she had done to America and to Scotland, and she acted in accordance with commercial principles that then governed all colonial policy. It was a fundamental maxim that the commercial interests of a dependency should be wholly subordinated to those of the mother country, and to an English mind there was no reason why this maxim should not be rigidly applied to Ireland. Davenant, who in the early years of the eighteenth century was the most influential writer on commercial questions, strenuously maintained that the greater cheapness of living and labour in Ireland rendered her a dangerous rival, and that therefore every form of industry which could compete with English manufacture should be discouraged or suppressed. All encouragement, he says, that can possibly consist

1 Letter from a Country Gentleman in the Province of Munster to his Grace the Lord Primate. Dublin, 1741.

2 E.g. on Killiney Hill, near Maynooth, and at Portarlington.

3 Smith's Account of the County of Kerry (1756), p. 77,

with the welfare of England should be given to Irish
planters, and he suggests that the admission of Irish
cattle into England would be, on the whole, advantage-
ous to England and the best means of diverting the
Irish from manufactures, but he strongly supports the
absolute prohibition of the Irish wool manufacture and
objects to all encouragement of the linen manufacture.1
The Catholics, who formed the bulk of the Irish people,
were looked upon in England with unmingled hatred.
The Irish Protestants owed their ascendency to England,
and she had but lately re-established it by an expensive
war. The real peculiarity of the case lay much less in
the commercial legislation of England than in the situa-
tion of Ireland. Scotland possessed an independent
parliament, supported by the entire nation, and she was
therefore able to make herself so troublesome that Eng-
land purchased the Union by ample commercial privi-
leges. The American colonies contained within them-
selves almost unlimited resources. No legislation could
counteract their great natural advantages. They were
inhabited by a people who, from the circumstances of
the case, possessed much more than average energy,
and they were so large and so distant from the mother
country that it was practically impossible very seriously
to injure their trade. The position of Ireland was totally
different. Her parliament was wholly dependent on that
of England. Her ruling caste were planted in the midst
of a hostile and subjugated population. She lay within
a few hours of the English coast. The bulk of her
people were crushed to the very dust by penal laws,2

1 Davenant's Works, ii. 237–

257.

2 The way in which the penal laws reacted on industrial life is well put in a pamphlet which appeared during Lord Hartington's Viceroyalty. In 1703 the

penal and excluding laws against
the Roman Catholics were as-
sented to by Queen Anne. In
the year following, our lands fell
under 10 per cent. Every branch
of industry fell in consequence
and in proportion, and although

1

and most of the men of energy and ambition were driven from her shore. She was thus completely within the grasp of England, and that grasp was tightened till almost every element of her prosperity was destroyed.

According to the maxims then prevailing, the policy was a very natural, but, as far as the true interests ofEngland were concerned, it was a very short-sighted one. If the Protestants were to be treated as an English garrison in Ireland, it was the obvious interest of the mother country that they should be as numerous, as powerful, and as united as possible. England, on the contrary, by her commercial laws, deliberately crushed their prosperity, drove them by thousands into exile, arrested the influx of a considerable Protestant population from Great Britain, prevented the formation of those industrial habits and feelings which are the most powerful support of a Government, and inspired the Presbyterians of the North with a bitter hatred of her rule. Not content with this, she proceeded to divide her friends. The English Toleration Act was not extended to Ireland, and the Nonconformists in the first years of the eighteenth century only celebrated their worship by connivance.

it would be unfair to charge to the abjection and incapacities of the Papists all the evils we then laboured under, yet it is beyond all doubt owing to the numberless restraints laid upon them that the kingdom showed few or no symptoms of recovery for many years. The sensation of real and the prospect of perpetual bondage produce woeful counteractions in the human mind.... Where any considerable body of the people are thrown into this political apathy, arts and manufactures must languish of course, and inward decays must come in aid of the exterior wounds of the

State.'-The Case of the Roman Catholics of Ireland (1755), p. 45. As another writer says, 'threefourths or two-thirds of the people being Papists made the Protestants cause laws for their own security which in their consequences discourage the labour and industry of the Papists, and keep the lower people so poor, and prevent agriculture, that there is no store or reserve of grain, and every three or four years there is a scarcity.'-Loose papers relating to Ireland (British Museum, Lansd. MSS. 242), pp. 61, 62.

The sacramental test was inserted by the English ministers in the Anti-Popery Bill of 1704, and the Dissenters were thus excluded from all municipal offices. Their marriages, unless celebrated by an Episcopal clergyman, were irregular, and subjected them to vexatious prosecutions in the ecclesiastical courts; and in 1713 the English Parliament extended the provisions of the Schism Act to Ireland. The Catholics were, no doubt, for a time paralysed, but in this quarter also the seeds of future retribution were abundantly sown. By a long course of hostile legislation, directed expressly against their religion, they were educated into hatred of the law. The landlords of their own persuasion, who would have been their natural and their most moderate leaders, were, as a class, gradually abolished. Education, industrial pursuits, ambition, and wealth, all of which mitigate the intensity of religious bigotry, were steadily denied them. Every tendency to amalgamate with the Protestants was arrested, and the whole Catholic population were reduced to a degree of ignorance and poverty in which the normal checks on population wholly ceased to operate. Starvation may check the multiplication of population, but the fear of starvation never does. In a peaceful community, in which infanticide is almost unknown and gross vice very rare, the real check to excessive multiplication is a high standard of comfort. The shame and dread of falling below it, the desire of attaining a higher round in the social ladder, lead to self-denial, providence, and tardy marriages. But when men have no such standard, when they are accustomed to live without any of the decencies, ornaments, or luxuries of life; when potatoes and milk and a mud hovel are all they require and all they can hope for ; when, in a word, they are so wretched that they can hardly, by any imprudence, make their condition permanently worse than it is, they will impose no restraint