one, until near the end of the century, were competent to vote. Taxes
were collected over the whole island, but only Protestants had a voice
in their disposal. All the parliamentary struggles of this century, it
must clearly be understood, were struggles between Protestants and
Protestants, and the different political parties, "patriotic" and
others, were parties formed exclusively amongst the Protestants
themselves. Protestantism was not only the privileged, but it was also
the polite, creed; the creed of the upper classes, as distinguished from
the creed of the potato-diggers and the turf-cutters; a view of the
matter of which distinct traces may even yet be discovered in Ireland.

If Protestants, as compared with their Roman Catholic brethren, were
happy, the Protestant colony was very far from being allowed its own
way, or permitted to govern itself as it thought fit. Although avowedly
kept as her garrison, and to preserve her own power in Ireland, England
had no notion of allowing it equal advantages with herself, or of
running the smallest risk of its ever coming to stand upon any dangerous
footing of equality. The fatal theory that it was the advantage of the
one country that the other should be kept poor, had by this time firmly
taken root in the minds of English statesmen, and to it, and to the
unreasonable jealousy of a certain number of English traders, the
disasters now to be recorded were mainly due.

Cromwell had placed English and Irish commerce upon an equal footing.
Early in Charles II.'s reign an Act had however been passed to hinder
the importation of Irish cattle into England, one which had struck a
disastrous, not to say fatal, blow at Irish agricultural interests. Then
as now cattle was its chief wealth, and such a prohibition meant nothing
short of ruin to the landowners, and through them to all who depended
upon them. So far Irish ports were open, however, to foreign countries,
and when the cattle trade ceased to be profitable, much of the land had
been turned by its owners into sheepwalks. There was a large and an
increasing demand for Irish wool upon the Continent, in addition to
which a considerable number of manufacturers had of late started
factories, and an energetic manufacture of woollen goods was going on,
and rapidly becoming the principal form of Irish industry. The English
traders, struck by this fact, were suddenly smitten with panic. The
Irish competition, they declared, were reduci