fresh misgovernment in their train. Cromwell's settlers kept their grip on the lands they had seized from the old proprietors, and this additional fountain of bitterness was the only thing that remained from the interval of Puritan sway. Another civil war (1688-91) ushered in the final conquest by William III., which completed the work begun by the first Tudors nearly two centuries before. The island was brought into obedience, the obedience of despair, to the power of England. The forces of civilisation which England had at her command had now free scope for an action which a wise policy might have made beneficent.

But what was the condition of the country, what the temper of the people? Frequent wars had desolated the soil, checked the growth of towns, prevented the rise of commerce or the improvement of agriculture. The great mass of the inhabitants lived in hovels as bad as those of Connemara at the present day, and were always on the verge of famine. Speaking the Gaelic tongue only, without education or the means of getting it, professing a proscribed religion, ignorant of the laws they were expected to obey, they had nothing in common with the Protestant colonists who were now to rule them, not only as magistrates, but also as landlords. Such of the Roman Catholic gentry as had retained their estates were stripped of all political and many civic rights, and left virtually at the mercy of a Protestant enemy. Much of the best blood, and all the more ardent spirits of the nation, unable to brook servitude at home, sought a career in the armies of France, Spain, or the Empire. Among those who remained, whether of the upper or of the humbler classfor a middle class scarcely existed out of Dublin-what room was there for loyalty to the English Crown? them, smarting from the loss of their land by violence or injustice cloaked with legal forms, and remembering the savage wars of nearly two centuries, the English colonists seemed what the Turks seem now to the Christians of the East-a band of robbers encamped on the

soil that once was theirs, calling themselves a government, but giving none of the benefits of government in return for the rent and taxes they extorted. And the English Crown was nothing but the titular authority which stood behind the English colonists, leaving Ireland to their mercy.

It is well to realise these things, not for the sake of invectives against England, which acted only as conquering nations always do act, and no worse than some nations of that age, but to explain the subsequent course of events. There were two, or perhaps three, distinct masses of population in Ireland, separated from one another by everything but local position. There was a small body of British colonists, a larger nation sprung from the original inhabitants. The colonists themselves were divided, for the Presbyterians of Ulster had little, except aversion to Rome, in common with the Episcopalians of the East and South. The colonists possessed all the power and privilege, and nearly all the wealth; the native population was plunged in ignorance and misery, and excluded from almost all civil rights. Beyond the sea there was in England a strong and prosperous state, centuries ahead of Ireland in many elements of civilisation, and most of all in those parts of civilisation which relate to law and government; a state holding Ireland as a dependency, resolved to let her fall to no other power, but scarcely deigning to attend to her concerns except for the purpose of preventing her industries from entering into competition with those of the richer country.

To help Ireland forward in the path of culture and economic progress, to weld into one the various elements of population inhabiting her soil, and fit them to be politically incorporated with England and Scotland, so as to produce one great and truly united people, each part of which might contribute to the harmonious perfection of the whole-this was the task which lay before English statesmen at the end of the seventeenth century, a task whose accomplishment was, as events have proved, scarcely less essential to the welfare

b

of the greater than to that of the lesser island. The narrative contained in the present volume, which opens with the Treaty of Limerick, signed in 1691, and broken almost before its ink was dry, relates in detail how this task was dealt with. But before I close these introductory remarks, a few words may be said on the salient features of the period which followed.

Of all the problems of government that of the administration of a dependency is the most difficult, and of all possible modes of administering a dependency that of leaving it to a dominant caste seems to be the worst. The operation of natural forces is interfered with, because revolution, the natural remedy in extreme cases of misgovernment, is prevented by the power of the superior country. The superior country remains ignorant of the facts and insensible of her responsibility. The dominant caste ceases to have patriotism, because it looks to the superior country for support, and remains alienated from the mass of its fellow-subjects. It has even an interest in checking any progress which may threaten its own ascendency. These were the mischiefs which beset the government of Ireland by a small caste of Protestant landlords. There was a Parliament, but it was a caste Parliament, and it had too little power to have a sense of responsibility, for ultimate control lay with the viceroy and the English ministry. For Ireland to have been ruled by a despotic viceroy would have been better; for such a viceroy, had he remained long in office, might have been so touched by the sufferings of the people and offended by the insolence of the caste as to seek to signalise his administration by beneficent reforms. But even the chance of benefit from reforming viceroys was denied. They came and went in quick succession. They came mostly to enrich themselves and their dependants, and such action as they took was taken to secure what they called "the English interest." The ministry in London neither knew nor cared how the people fared in Ireland. The people could hardly have

fared worse.

While England, and presently Scotland also, made rapid strides, Ireland stood still. Says Mr. Goldwin Smith:

"The mass of the people were socially and economically in a state the most deplorable, perhaps, which history records as having existed in any civilised nation. . . . The Irish gentry were probably the very worst upper class with which a country was ever afflicted. Their habits grew beyond measure brutal and reckless. Their drunkenness, their blasphemy, their ferocious duelling, left the squires of England far behind. . . . Over the Roman Catholic poor on their estates these 'vermin of the kingdom,' as Arthur Young calls them, exercised a tyranny compared with which the arbitrary rule of the old chiefs over their clans was probably a parental authority used with beneficence and justly repaid by gratitude and affection. . . . All moral restraints on the growth of population were removed by the compulsory ignorance with which Protestant ascendancy and the penal laws had plunged the Catholic peasantry and the abject wretchedness of their lot. . . The island became utterly overcharged with population. A mortal struggle for existence between the cotters on the one side and the 'middlemen' and tithe-proctors on the other then commenced, and a century of agrarian conspiracy and crime was the result. The atrocities perpetrated by the Whiteboys, especially in the earlier period of agrarianism (for they afterwards grew somewhat less inhuman), are such as to make the flesh creep. No language can be too strong in speaking of the horrors of such a state of society. But it would be unjust to confound these agrarian conspiracies with ordinary crime, or to suppose that they imply a propensity to ordinary crime either on the part of those who commit them or on the part of the people who connive at and favour their commission. In the districts where agrarian conspiracy and outrage were most rife, the number of ordinary crimes was very small. In plain truth, the secret tribunals which administered the Whiteboy code were to the people the organs of a wild law of social morality by

which, on the whole, the interest of the peasant was protected."1

It was under conditions like these that the suspicion of the law and its ministers became worked into the very nerves and blood of the Irish peasant. His lawlessness, which scarcely exceeded the lawlessness of the landlord magistrates who ruled him, was not political, but directed against the land system and tithe system from which he suffered. He was too ignorant to have political aspirations; nor did the Catholics make any movement in favour of either the elder or the younger Pretender. It was among the Ascendancy party that resistance to England began. They saw Irish manufactures destroyed for the sake of English manufactures; heavy duties laid on Irish exports to England; Irish revenues jobbed away in providing places or pensions for favourites too disreputable even for the corrupt England of that day. England did nothing for Ireland, and suffered her to do nothing for herself. Then at last the natural forces that make for freedom asserted themselves. Even among this tyrannous aristocracy a national feeling sprang up, and some of its better members, by the help of the Presbyterians of Ulster, who had long smarted under oppressions, and had now been inspired with hope by the revolt of the American colonies, seized for the first time upon England's necessity as Ireland's opportunity, and extorted, in 1782, the recognition of legislative independence. Though the Irish Parliament, which lasted from that year to 1800, was usually more than half filled with pensioners, placemen, and the nominees of the Crown or of some magnate, and though only Protestant Episcopalians were eligible to sit in it, it swept away some bad laws and gave a momentary stimulus to the material prosperity of the island. A still better result of freedom was seen in the appearance of a large and liberal Irish patriotism. The Roman Catholics, therefore, downtrodden and despairing, took hope and be

1 "Irish History and Irish Character," pp. 189 sqq.