en to be found ready to risk their lives and
fortunes or to undertake the thankless and dangerous duties of county
magistrates.

It is curious how close a parallel might be drawn between the way
in which Norman Ireland was Ersefied and that in which Cromwellian
Ireland was Catholicized. Many of those who became large landowners
by the Cromwellian confiscations, having no religious prejudices (some
might say, no religious or humane feelings), when the leases of
their tenants fell in, put the farms up to auction regardless of the
feelings of the occupiers. As the Roman Catholics were content with
a simpler manner of life than the Protestants, they generally offered
higher rents; the dispossessed Protestants, driven from their homes,
joined their brethren in America. Then in the South, the poorer of
Cromwell's settlers, in some cases, neglected by their own pastors,
joined the religion of the majority; in others, intermarrying with the
natives, allowed their children to be brought up in the faith of their
mothers. Hence we arrive at the curious fact that at the present day
some of the most ardent Romanists and violent Nationalists, who are
striving to have the Irish language enforced all over the country,
and pose as the representatives of ancient Irish septs, are really the
descendants of Cromwell's soldiers.

So passed the greater part of the eighteenth century; and the unhappy
country seemed as far off from progress and prosperity as ever.

CHAPTER VI.

THE EARLIER PART OF THE REIGN OF GEORGE III. THE ACQUISITION OF
INDEPENDENCE BY THE IRISH PARLIAMENT.

When we come to the reign of George III we have arrived at a specially
interesting period of Irish history. For we are no longer dealing with
a state of society that has wholly passed away; the great events that
occurred towards the close of the eighteenth century are continually
referred to as bearing, at least by analogy, on the questions of the
present day. It is for the honest historian to examine how far that
analogy is real, and how far it is delusive.

For some time after the accession of George III, the state of Ireland
was almost as miserable as before. Trade and manufactures being nearly
crushed out, want of employment brought the people in the towns to the
brink of starvation. In the country, although the middle classes were
on the whole becoming more prosperous, the condition of the labourers
and cottiers was wretched in the extreme. It is not