to consign their histories to utter oblivion. Had they the slightest knowledge of their duty, or did they pay attention to its discharge, they would have marked the act with the brand of infamy and reprobation, which it had so richly earned. There was not a subject in his dominions, whose estate the rapacious monarch might not have seized, under some pretence or other, as valid; nor, in fact, is there an estate under the starspangled canopy of heaven, which might not be seized with equal justice, and equal regard to "law, honour, and conscience."

In the "famous northern plantation, so honourable to king James," according to the very accurate Leland, we have seen that the natives were despoiled of the paltry modicum of the soil, which the rapacity of the monarch had allotted them, to support a miserable existence. As might be expected, the Leinster adventurers, in order to keep their Ulster friends in countenance, followed their captivating example, and defrauded the natives to precisely the same extent. This verifies the old Latin adage,

"Ad regis exemplum totus componitur orbis."

"In the county of Longford, the natives in general had scarce a third part of their former possessions, either in number of acres or in value of profitable ground, allotted them. The arts of admeasurement were well understood in those days; and, as the king had directed a certain quantity of unprofitable ground, bog, wood, and mountain, to be thrown into the several proportions of profitable land allotted to British and natives,

a great latitude of judgment was left to the commissioners, which some of them knew how to make use of for their advantage.

“Hence several persons were turned out of large estates of profitable land, and had only a small pittance, less than a fourth part, assigned them for it, in barren ground."218

"In the small county of Longford, we find that twenty-five of one sept were all deprived of their estates, without the least compensation, or any means of subsistence allotted them.'

219

Sup

We may form a tolerably accurate idea of the frightful extent to which the spirit of rapine was carried, from the specimen here exhibited. What a hideous specimen! Proprietors expelled from their large paternal estates, in rich vallies and 'profitable lands," and receiving "a fourth part of the amount in barren ground." Let us bring the matter home to an American reader. pose a descendant of William Penn, settled on the rich lands in Lancaster, Chester, or Delaware counties, and owning one thousand acres, worth one hundred and fifty dollars per acre, expelled from thence, because he "built no houses, nor planted orchards or gardens," banished to some of the barren lands of Northumberland or Lycoming, with two hundred and fifty acres, hardly worth one dollar per acre; thus receiving, in lord Clarendon's millenium, "that blessed condition of peace and security," two hundred and fifty dollars, as an equivalent for an hundred and fifty thousand. This is a very fair view of the equitable doctrine of equivalents, as studied and 219 Leland, II. 546.

218 Carte, I. 23.

carried into practice by those upright agents of the pious James, who, to use the words of Leland, were employed "to reduce those savages to order and subjection."

But the case of those wretched people, placed on the "barren lands," and with an equivalent of one-fourth of the number of acres whereof they were plundered, was not, it appears, the most grievous that occurred. We see, that of one single sept, or family, twenty-five were turned adrift, "without the least compensation, or any means of subsistence allotted them." How many twenty-fives, how many hundreds, were thus turned out, it is impossible to conceive. But it is not presuming very far, to suppose, as the one side was destitute of defence, and the other of every sense of honour and justice, that the cases were numerous; and that there were hundreds, perhaps thousands, who were driven out of house and home, and turned loose on society, "without any means of subsistence allotted them;" and this, let me repeat, (it can never be too often repeated) during a period, in which, with the most unblushing falsehood, Clarendon has dared to impose on a betrayed and deluded world, the monstrous assertion, that "whatever their land, labour, or industry produced, was their own, being free from fear of having it taken from them by the king, upon any pretence whatever, without their own consent."

When the monarch of three powerful kingdoms, who ought to be a pattern of honour, honesty, and justice, and, as Sir John Davies declared, to have scorned to "dispossess the meanest of his subjects wrongfully," becomes a common depredator on their estates, and acts the part of the ravening wolf, instead of that of the vigilant shepherd, it is not wonderful that such portion of those subjects as form a privileged cast, should prey upon and devour the others. This has ever been, and ever will be, the result, in all analogous cases.

CHAPTER IX.

Projected spoliation of Connaught. Jury fined eighty thousand pounds sterling, for not perjuring themselves by a false verdict. Historical obliquity.

THE project formed by the pious James, of an extensive plantation in Connaught, for the purpose of spoiling the Egyptians, those wretches who did not esteem lawful matrimony," who "built no houses, and planted no orchards nor gardens," was, as shown in the preceding chapter, defeated by death, who snatched him away, in the midst of his career, to render an account, in another world, before the omniscient Judge of mankind,`of his rapine and depredation in this. But, alas! the respite thus afforded to the western province of Ireland, was of short duration. During the succeeding reign, the nefarious project was revived, by the arrogant, rapacious, and vindictive Wentworth, who meditated nothing less, according to Leland, than the subversion of the title of every estate in the province.*

* "His project was nothing less than to subvert the title to every estate in every part of Connaught, and to establish a new plantation through this whole province; a project, which,