ign powers would afford the Irish people an
opportunity of putting an end to English rule in Ireland, and of
declaring the country an independent nation. As progress in wealth and
prosperity would add to the probabilities of success in such an event,
it was the all but avowed--nay, truth compels me to say, the
_frequently avowed_ policy of England to keep Ireland poor, and
therefore feeble, that she might be held the more securely. For that
reason she was not treated as a portion of a united kingdom, but as an
enemy who had become England's slave by conquest, who was her rival in
manufactures of various kinds, who might undersell her in foreign
markets, and, in fact, who might grow rich and powerful enough to assert
her independence.

The descendants of the Norman adventurers who got a footing here in the
twelfth century; English and Scotch planters; officials and undertakers
who, from time to time, had been induced to settle in Ireland by grants
of land and sinecures, were, by a legal fiction, styled The Nation,
although they were never more than a small fraction of it. For a great
number of years every writer, every public man, every Act of Parliament,
assumed that the English colony in Ireland was the Irish nation.
Denunciations of Papists, the "common enemy"--gross falsehoods about
their principles and acts--fears real or pretended, of their wicked,
bloodthirsty plots, thickly strewn in our path as we journey through
this dismal period of our history--reveal to us, as it were by accident,
that there was another people in this island, besides those whom the law
regarded as the nation; but they had no rights, they were outlaws--"the
Irish enemy." One hundred and fifty years ago Primate Boulter expressed
his belief that those outlaws made four-fifths of the population, and
the English colony only one-fifth; but the colonists held the rich
lands; the bulk of the people, who formed the real nation, were in the
bogs, the lonely glens, and on the sterile mountains, where agriculture
was all but impossible, except to the great capitalist. Capital they had
none, and they were forced to subsist, as best they could, on little
patches of tillage among the rocks, whose _debris_ made the land around
them in some sort susceptible of cultivation. By degrees those outlaws
discovered that the potato, coming from the high moist soil of Quito,
found in the half-barren wilds of Ireland, if not a climate, a soil at
least congenial to its