s money or give a portion
to his children, if he could not rely on positive laws and on the
uninterrupted possession of many years? The military adventurers among
whom Cromwell portioned out the soil might perhaps be regarded as
wrongdoers. But how large a part of their estates had passed, by fair
purchase, into other hands! How much money had proprietors borrowed on
mortgage, on statute merchant, on statute staple! How many capitalists
had, trusting to legislative acts and to royal promises, come over
from England, and bought land in Ulster and Leinster, without the least
misgiving as to the title! What a sum had those capitalists expended,
during a quarter of a century, in building; draining, inclosing,
planting! The terms of the compromise which Charles the Second had
sanctioned might not be in all respects just. But was one injustice to
be redressed by committing another injustice more monstrous still? And
what effect was likely to be produced in England by the cry of thousands
of innocent English families whom an English king had doomed to ruin?
The complaints of such a body of sufferers might delay, might prevent,
the Restoration to which all loyal subjects were eagerly looking
forward; and, even if his Majesty should, in spite of those complaints,
be happily restored, he would to the end of his life feel the pernicious
effects of the injustice which evil advisers were now urging him to
commit. He would find that, in trying to quiet one set of malecontents,
he had created another. As surely as he yielded to the clamour raised at
Dublin for a repeal of the Act of Settlement, he would, from the day
on which he returned to Westminster, be assailed by as loud and
pertinacious a clamour for a repeal of that repeal. He could not but be
aware that no English Parliament, however loyal, would permit such laws
as were now passing through the Irish Parliament to stand. Had he made
up his mind to take the part of Ireland against the universal sense of
England? If so, to what could he look forward but another banishment
and another deposition? Or would he, when he had recovered the greater
kingdom, revoke the boors by which, in his distress, he had purchased
the help of the smaller? It might seem an insult to him even to suggest
that he could harbour the thought of such unprincely, of such unmanly,
perfidy. Yet what other course would be left to him? And was it not
better for him to refuse unreasonable concessions now than to re