6 earlier in the century by the idiotcy of the bishops. Fresh multitudes now winged their way to join them, and in no tender mood towards the institutions under which they had been so cruelly dealt with. The House of Commons had backed up the landlords. The next year they had to hear from the Linen Board that many thousands of the best manufacturers and weavers with their families had gone to seek their bread in America, and that thousands were preparing to follow.' Again a committee was appointed to enquire. This time the blame was laid on England, which had broken the linen compact, given bounties to the Lancashire millowners which Belfast was not. allowed to share, and in jealousy of Irish manufactures' had laid duties on Irish sail cloth, contrary to express stipulation. The accusation, as the reader knows, was true. Religious bigotry, commercial jealousy, and modern landlordism had combined to do their worst against the Ulster settlement. The emigration was not the whole of the mischief. Those who went carried their arts and their tools along with them, and at the rate at which the stream was flowing the colonies would soon have no need of British and Irish imports. In the two years which followed the Antrim evictions, thirty thousand Protestants left Ulster for a land where there' was no legal robbery, and where those who sowed the seed could reap the harvest. They went with bitterness in their hearts, cursing and detesting the aristocratic system of which the ennobling qualities were lost, and only the worst retained. The south and west were caught by the same movement, and ships could not be found to carry the crowds who were eager to go. 'The emigration was not only II. 1772. V. 1772. BOOK depriving Ireland of its manufactures, but of the sinews of its trade.' 'Rich yeomen with their old leases expired' refused to renew them in a country where they were to live at other men's mercy, and departed with their families and their capital. Protestant settlements which had lingered through the century now almost disappeared Bandon, Tullamore, Athlone, Kilbeggan, and many other places once almost exclusively English and Scotch, were abandoned to the priests and the Celts.1 Pitiable and absurd story, on the face of which was written madness! Industry deliberately ruined by the commercial jealousy of England; the country abandoned to anarchy by the scandalous negligence of English statesmen; idle absentee magnates forgetting that duty had a meaning, and driving their tenants into rebellion and exile; resident gentry wasting their substance in extravagance, and feeding their riot by wringing the means of it out of the sweat of the poor; a Parliament led by patriots, whose love of country meant but the art to embarrass Government, and wrench from it the spoils of office; Government escaping from its difficulties by lavishing gold which, like metallic poison, destroyed the selfrespect and wrecked the character of those who stooped to take it; the working members of the community, and the worthiest part of it, flying from a soil where some fatal enchantment condemned to failure every effort made for its redemption-such was the fair condition of the Protestant colony planted in better days to show the Irish the fruits of a nobler belief than their own, and the industrial virtues of a 16 'Report of the Committee of the House of Commons as to Emigration, 1774.'-Commons' Journals. nobler race! Who can wonder that English rule in Ireland has become a byeword? who can wonder that the Celts failed to recognise a superiority which had no better result to show for itself? We lay the fault on the intractableness of the race. The modern Irishman is of no race, so blended now is the blood of Celt and Dane, Saxon and Norman, Scot and Frenchman. (The Irishman of the last century rose to his natural level whenever he was removed from his own unhappy country. In the Seven Years' War Austria's best generals were Irishmen. Brown was an Irishman; Lacy was an Irishman; O'Donnell's name speaks for him; and Lally Tollendal, who punished England at Fontenoy, was O'Mullally of Tollendally. Strike the names of Irishmen out of our own public service, and we lose the heroes of our proudest exploits-we lose the Wellesleys, the Pallisers, the Moores, the Eyres, the Cootes, the Napiers; we lose half the officers and half the privates who conquered India for us, and fought our battles in the Peninsula. What the Irish could do as enemies we were about to learn when the Ulster exiles crowded to the standard of Washington. What they can be even at home we know at this present hour, when, under exceptional discipline as police, they are at once the most sorely tempted and the most nobly faithful of all subjects of the British race. 'Realms without justice,' said Henry the Eighth long ago, writing of the same Ireland which is still an unsolved problem, 'be but tyrannies and robories more consonaunt to beastly appetites than to the laudable liff of reasonable creatures.'1 When England 1 Henry VIII. to the Earl of Surrey.'-State Papers, vol. ii. p. 52. CHAP. II. 1772. BOOK V. 1772. learns to prefer realities to forms, when she recog nises once for all, that having taken possession of Ireland for her own purposes, she is bound before God and man to make the laws obeyed there, and to deal justly between man and man, disaffection and discontent will disappear, and Ireland will cease to be a reproach; but the experiment remains to be tried, CHAPTER III. LORD HARCOURT AND COLONEL BLAQUIERE. SECTION I. LORD TOWNSHEND had spoken of endeavours to unite the popular party in Ireland and America. There were good reasons why at that moment these two countries should be of peculiar interest to one another. Ireland was but a colony of longer standing, and the Americans saw a picture there of the condition to which an English colony could be reduced in which the mother country had her own way. Their trade was already exclusively in English hands. In a little while they too might have an established church, interfering with liberty of conscience; their farms, which they had cleared and clothed with corn and orchards, might be claimed by landlords. The Scotch-Irish emigrants especially had their suspicions on the alert, whose grievances were more recent, and whose bitter feelings were kept alive by the continued arrivals from Ulster. None of the Transatlantic settlers had more cause to complain, for none had deserved so well of the country from which they had been driven. The Protestant settlers in Ireland at the beginning of the 17th century were of the same metal with those who afterwards sailed in the May Flower'— CHAP. III. |