which gave each man a life interest in a certain portion of the soil, and so forfeited large districts. His successors followed in the path of spoliation; a new class of owners came into possession, whose laws prevented the improvement of the land, and thus lessened the supply of food, and diminished the population. The tide of confiscation ebbed and flowed during these reigns, but in so doing the native possessors were almost entirely swept away. V. THE HANOVERIAN PERIOD. "The evil that men do lives after them." THE history of the period that elapsed between the death of Queen Anne and the accession of Queen Victoria is an illustration of the truth of the sapient exclamation of the bard of Avon. "The settlement " commenced by the first Stuart sovereign, and carried out so ruthlessly down to the close of the last reign of that dynasty, originated in a wish to extend the royal prerogative and increase the regal revenue. The scheme of Ahab to possess the vineyard of Naboth found imitators in the viceroys and nobles, and the most flagitious and wicked acts were resorted to, with the object of handing over the lands of Ireland to the chief "adventurers." A nation of landholders or owners was converted into a nation of serfs or outlaws, and when fomenting rebellion and hatching plots did not suffice, religious animosity was enkindled, and the most odious acts were perpetrated in the sacred name of religion. Well may we exclaim, Oh, religion, what infamous acts are done in thy name!" The outrages perpetrated by the new upon the old landholders led to a class of offences which are called "agrarian." They proceed from a combination of those who think they have been wronged, and who seek by mutual protection to revenge the injuries perpetrated on them in the name of law. Many of the new "proprietors" proceeded to "clear" their lands, i. e., to expel the occupants, in order to throw several small farms into a large one. This was resented, and as Gordon, in his early as 1760 an outbreak of this character, under the name of the "Levellers," took place in Munster. History of Ireland, says,— "It was occasioned by the expulsion of great numbers of labouring peasants, destitute of any regular means of subsistence by any other species of industry: numbers of them secretly assembled in the night, and vented their fury on objects ignorantly conceived to be the causes of their misery.' Then followed the "Hearts of Oak," "Hearts of Steel," and "Peep-o'-Day Boys." "This insurrection was excited by the conduct of the middlemen, who demanded excessive fines, and racked the old tenants to an extent utterly beyond their power to pay; they were of course 'cleared.'" I do not wish you to accept my ipse dixit as to this condition of the Irish landholders and farmers during this period, and will therefore give you the ipsissima verba of some contemporary writers. Lord Taaffe, writing in 1766, thus describes the effect of the laws upon the condition of the people : "The Catholics keep their farms in a bad plight, as they are excluded by law from durable and profitable tenures." Lord Macartney in 1773 says, "If a Papist becomes a farmer, he shall not cultivate or improve his possession, being discouraged by the short limitation of his tenure; and yet we complain of the dulness and laziness of a people whose spirit is restrained from exertion, and whose industry has no reward to excite it." Arthur Young, in his Tour in Ireland in 1777, gives the following list of the penal statutes respecting land in Ireland, which were then in force :— "Catholics were incapacitated from purchasing land. from lending money on mortgage. their estates went in gavel among their children. "No Catholic could take a house for more than thirty-one years, and the rent must be two-thirds of the full value, and he could not have a horse worth more than £5." He adds, "The preceding catalogue is very imperfect. These laws have crushed all industry, and wrested most of the property from the Catholics." The same traveller thus describes the condition of the Irish people in 1778: "A landlord in Ireland can scarcely invent an order which a servant labourer or cottier dares to refuse to execute. Nothing satisfies him but unlimited submission. Disrespect, or anything tending towards sauciness, he may punish with his cane or horsewhip with the most perfect security. A poor man would have his bones broken if he offered to lift his hand in his own defence. Knocking down is spoken of in the country in a manner that makes an Englishman stare. Landlords of consequence have assured us that many of the cottiers would think themselves honoured by having their wives and daughters sent for to the bed of their master-a mark of slavery which proves the oppression under which such people must live. Nay, I have heard anecdotes of the lives of people being made free with without any apprehension of the justice of a jury. But let it not be imagined that this is curious; formerly it happened every day, but the law gains ground. It must strike the most careless traveller to see whole strings of cars whipped into a ditch by a gentleman's footman to make way for his carriage; if they are overturned or broken to pieces, no matter, it is taken in patience; were they to complain, they would perhaps be horsewhipped. The execution of the laws lies very much in the hands of the justices of the peace, many of whom are drawn from the most illiberal class of the kingdom. If a poor man lodges his complaint against a gentleman, or any animal that chooses to call himself a gentleman, and the justice issues out a summons for appearance, it is a fixed affront, and he will infallibly be called out. Where manners are in conspiracy against law, to whom are the opposed people to have recourse? It is a fact that a poor man having a contest with a gentlemanbut I am talking nonsense; they know their situation too well to think of that; they can have no defence but by means of protection from one gentleman against another, who probably protects his vassal as he would the sheep he intends to eat.' William Pitt spoke thus of the legislative policy of England towards Ireland previously to 1782 "The system has been that of debarring Ireland from the enjoyment and use of her resources, to make that kingdom completely subservient to the interest and opulence of this country (England) without suffering her to share in the bounties of nature and the industry of her citizens, or making them contribute to the general interests and strength of the empire. This system of cruel and abominable restraint has been exploded." Mr. Fitzgibbon (afterwards Lord Clare), when attorneygeneral, declared in the Irish House of Commons in 1786,— “Although tithes had been mentioned as the cause of the insurrection, yet such was not the fact, but that it arose from the peasants being ground down to powder by exorbitant rents, and who were so far from being able to pay their dues to the clergy that they possessed not food nor raiment for themselves." Wakefield and Young, 1780, say with regard to Ireland that it would require an expenditure of £120,000,000 to bring its cultivation up to a level with that of the neighbouring island of Great Britain,* and that the average rent of the surface is only 17s. an English acre.† The Dublin Evening Post for July 15th, 1786, says,— "No kingdom perhaps experiences the want of a yeomanry in the degree that Ireland does. To the traveller no ranks are distinguish able save that of the rabble and the gentry.” Mr. Tighe, of Woodstock, in 1802, adds,— "The bad state and deficiency of agricultural buildings, and the unimproved condition of many farms, may arise from various causes. First, nothing is ever built or repaired by the landlords. These expenses, as well as every other improvement, are left to the tenant, who generally comes into a dilapidated holding without capital enough to stock it, still less to build, to fence, to drain. Second, there is often a want of confidence between proprietor and occupier." Alison observes (vol. i., p. 502),— "Without doubt the first circumstance which contributed to produce the low standard of comfort and unbounded disposition to increase in the Irish poor was their subjugation to a foreign nation who did not make their island the chief state of government. The example of the Norman conquest of England is a decisive proof that such a conquest, if effected of so considerable a country as to occupy the first care and become wound up with the highest interests * Young's "Ireland," ii., 9. + Wakefield, i., 585. of the victor, is not only nowise inconsistent with subsequent prosperity, but may become a principal element in its formation. But the case is widely different when the conquest is effected of a country which governs its acquisition as a province. What Hungary is to Austria, and Poland to Russia, that Ireland has long been to Great Britain." Wakefield, in his "Account of Ireland," says, "The hapless peasants gave way to the impulse of their ungovernable passions, and vented their fury on those whom they considered as their oppressors. These commotions afford a striking and melancholy proof of the state of the country at the time they took place, and as they arose from causes unconnected with public measures may convince those who ascribe every evil they experience to the government that national misfortunes depend more on the conduct of individuals than is generally believed or admitted.” Amongst the measures for the relaxation of the penal laws passed by the Irish parliament was one which affected the size of the holdings. The power of voting was given to Roman Catholic forty-shilling freeholders. The Irish party in the Irish parliament argued that it would be wiser to give greater political power to the Roman Catholic gentry, and they urged that the boon given to the uneducated classes would be used to obtain the rights which were withheld. This prophecy was fulfilled, but the agitation for complete Emancipation diverted the energies of the people from the advancement of their material interests. The creation of the forty-shilling freeholders led to a great breaking up of lands, and the fostering of a class of small holders, who, when that franchise was virtually destroyed, were swept off the lands. The Act of Union greatly increased absenteeism, and encouraged that bane of a country, middlemen; the Irish peers who had town residences in Dublin, and who spent the portion of the year unoccupied by parliamentary duties on their estates, gave up the former, and became denizens of London many of them rarely visited their Irish estates. This absence from Ireland destroyed many of the smaller industries in Ireland. The woollen manufactures, which were flourishing in 1800, had nearly disappeared in 1820, and the |