IV. CHAP. more, and so on indefinitely. Mortgages brought a new and numerous class of claimants. Thus humane 1763. connection between the tenant and landlord was not provided for. Leases were in the last resort most frequently given at will; and then what defence had the Irish Catholic against his Protestant superior? Hence the thatched mud cabin, without window or chimney; the cheap fences; the morass undrained: idleness in winter; the tenant's concealment of good returns: for to spend his savings in improving his farm would have been giving them to his immediate landlord. To the native Irish the English oligarchy appeared not in the attitude of kind proprietors, whom residence and a common faith, long possession and hereditary affection united with the tenantry, but as men of a different race and creed, who had acquired the island by force of arms, rapine, and chicane, and derived revenues from it by the employment of extortionate underlings or overseers.' This state of society, as a whole, was what ought not to be endured, and the English were conscious of it. The common law respects the right of self-defence; yet the Irish Catholics, or Popish recusants as they were called, were, by one universal prohibition,1 forbidden using or keeping any kind of weapons whatsoever, under penalties which the Crown could not remit. Any two justices might enter a house and search for arms, or summon any person whomsoever, and tender him an oath, of which the repeated refusal was punishable as treason. 'Irish statutes, 1695: Act for the security of Government. IV. Such was the Ireland of the Irish;-a conquered CHAP. people, whom the victors delighted to trample upon, and did not fear to provoke. Their industry within 1763 the kingdom was prohibited or repressed by law, and then they were calumniated as naturally idle. Their savings could not be invested on equal terms in trade, manufactures, or real property; and they were called improvident. The gates of learning were shut on them, and they were derided as ignorant. In the midst of privations they were cheerful. Suffering for generations under acts which offered bribes to treachery, their integrity was not debauched; no son rose against his father, no friend betrayed his friend. Fidelity to their religion, to which afflictions made them cling more closely, chastity, and respect for the ties of family, remained characteristics of the downtrodden race. America as yet offered it no inviting asylum, though her influence was soon to mitigate its sorrows and relax its bonds. Relief was to come through the conflicts of the North American colonies with Great Britain. Ireland and America, in so far as both were oppressed by the commercial monopoly of England, had a common cause; and while the penal laws against the Catholics did not affect the Anglo-Irish, they suffered equally with the native Irish from the mercantile system. The restrictions of the acts of trade extended not to America only, but to the sister kingdom. It had harbors, but it could not send a sail across the Atlantic, nor ship directly to the colonies, even in English vessels, any thing but "servants, and horses, and 'Edmund Burke to Sir H. Langrishe. VOL. V. 7 2 Acts "to which we never consented." Dean Swift. 1763. CHAP. victuals," and at last linens; nor receive sugar, or IV. coffee, or other colonial produce, but from England. Its great staple was wool; its most important natural manufacture was the woollen. "I shall do all that lies in my power to discourage the woollen manufactures of Ireland," said William of Orange. The exportation of Irish woollens to the colonies and to foreign countries was prohibited; and restrictive laws so interfered with the manufacture that it seemed probable, Irishmen would not be able to wear a coat of their own fabric.5 In the course of years the "English colonists" themselves began to be domiciliated in Ireland; and with the feeling that the country in which they dwelt was their home, there grew up discontent that it continued to be treated as a conquered country. Proceeding by insensible degrees, they at length maintained openly the legislative equality of the two kingdoms. In 1692, the Irish House of Commons claimed "the sole and undoubted right to prepare and resolve the means of raising money." In 1698,8 Molyneux, an Irish Protestant, and member for the University of Dublin, asserted, through the press, the perfect and reciprocal independence of the Irish and English parliaments; that Ireland was not bound by the acts of a legislative body in which it was not represented. Two replies were written to the tract, which was also formally condemned by the English House of ་ IV. Commons. When1 in 1719 the Irish House of Lords CHAP. denied for Ireland the judicial power of the House of Lords of Great Britain, the British parliament, 1763. making a precedent for all its outlying dominions, enacted, that "the king, with the consent of the parliament of Great Britain, had, hath, and of right ought to have full power and authority to make laws and statutes of force to bind the people and the kingdom of Ireland !" But the opposite opinion was confirmed among the Anglo-Irish statesmen. The Irish people set the example of resisting English laws by voluntary agreements to abstain from using English manufactures, and the patriot party had already acquired strength and skill, just at the time when the British parliament, by its purpose of taxing the American colonies, provoked their united population to raise the same questions, and in their turn to deny its power. But besides the conforming Protestant population, there was in Ireland another class of Protestants who shared in some degree the disqualifications of the Catholics. To Queen Anne's bill for preventing the further growth of Popery, a clause was added in England, and ratified by the Irish parliament, that none should be capable of any public employment, or of being in the magistracy of any city, who did not receive the sacrament according to the English test act; thus disfranchising the whole body of Pres 'Journals of the House of Com- Times. Curry's Historical and Critmons, 22 June, 1698. 25 Geo. I. c. i. 3 Dean Swift's State of Ireland. 4 2 Anne. 3 Burnet's History of His Own ical Review, ii. 235. Plowden's Burnet's History of His Own Times. 4 CHAP. byterians. At home, where the Scottish nation IV. enjoyed its own religion, the people were loyal: 1768. in Ireland, the disfranchised Scotch Presbyterians, who still drew their ideas of Christian government from the Westminster Confession, began to believe that they were under no religious obligation to render obedience to the British government. They could not enter the Irish parliament to strengthen the hands of the patriot party; nor were they taught by their faith to submit in patience, like the Catholic Irish. Had all Ireland resembled them, it could not have been kept in subjection. But what could be done by unorganized men, constituting only about a tenth of the people, in the land in which they were but sojourners? They were willing to quit a soil which was endeared to them by no traditions; and the American colonies opened their arms to receive them. They began to change their abode as soon as they felt oppression;1 and every successive period of discontent swelled the tide of emigrants. Just after the peace of Paris, "the Heart of Oak" Protestants of Ulster, weary of strife with their landlords, came over in great numbers; and settlements on the Catawba, in South Carolina, dated from that epoch. At different times in the eighteenth century, some had found homes in New-England, but they were most numerous south of New-York, from New-Jersey to Boulter to the Duke of Newcastle, 23 Nov. 1728: "The whole North is in a ferment at present, and people every day engaging one another to go the next year to the West Indies. The humor has spread like a contagious distemper; and the people will hardly hear anybody that tries to cure them of their madness. The worst is, that it affects only Protestants, and reigns chiefly in the North." Plowden's Historical Review, i. 276. Compare, too, Dean Swift's Letters. James Gordon's History of Ireland, ii. 241. 3 The parents of Andrew Jackson, the late President of the United States, reached South Carolina in 1764. |