sh people to be duly
grateful, inasmuch as it was a decided improvement upon the older
colonization scheme of "To h----or Connaught."[287]

The colonization scheme met with little or no support in Ireland. It was
suspected. It was regarded as a plan for getting rid of the Celt by
wholesale. A Protestant gentleman, Mr. Thomas Mulock, thus comments on
the memorial: "And is it come to this, O ye lords and gentlemen!
representatives of the Irish party, with prospective adhesions after the
Easter holidays from the vast majority of Irish Protestant
proprietors,--do you avow yourselves to be in the position of
landowners, who stand in no relation of aristocracy or leadership,
government or guidance, succour or solace to millions of the people, who
famish on the territorial possessions from which you derive your titles,
your importance, your influence, your wealth. Has confiscation been
mellowed into the legal semblance of undisputed succession, only to
bring about a state of things which the most ruthless ravagers of
nations never permanently perpetrated?"[288]

The memorial was extensively circulated. Amongst many others, one was
sent to the Right Rev. Dr. Maginn, Coadjutor Bishop of Derry. He replied
in terms scathing as they were indignant. The following is an extract
from his letter:--"In sober earnestness, gentlemen, why send your
circular to a Catholic bishop? Why have the bare-faced impudence to ask
me to consent to the expatriation of millions of my co-religionists and
fellow-countrymen? You, the hereditary oppressors of my race and my
religion,--you, who reduced one of the noblest peoples under heaven to
live in the most fertile island on earth on the worst species of a
miserable exotic, which no humane man, having anything better, would
constantly give to his swine or his horses;--you, who have made the most
beautiful island under the sun a land of skulls, or of ghastly
spectres;--you are anxious, I presume, to get a Catholic bishop to abet
your wholesale system of extermination--to head in pontificals the
convoy of your exiles, and thereby give the sanction of religion to your
atrocious scheme. You never, gentlemen, laboured under a more egregious
mistake than by imagining that we could give in our adhesion to your
principles, or could have any, the least confidence, in anything
proceeding from you. Is not the _ex-officio_ clause in the Poor-law
Bill your bantling, or that of your leader, Lord Stanley? Is not the