, and did so much damage in three
weeks that Thomas Oxford declared 1,500 men could not make it good.

We should be unjust if we were to regard this infamous dishonesty as
simply an accident of the Restoration time. Many of my American
readers have doubtless heard of an island called Ireland, which is
much nearer to England than Newfoundland. Lecky tells us how the
English land-owners, always foremost in selfishness, procured the
enactment of laws, in 1665 and 1680, absolutely prohibiting the
importation into England from Ireland of all cattle, sheep, and swine,
of beef, pork, bacon, and mutton, and even of butter and cheese, with
the natural result that the French were enabled to procure these
provisions at lower prices, and their work of settling their sugar
plantations was much facilitated thereby.

In the Navigation Act of 1663 Ireland was deprived of all the
advantages accorded to English ones, and thus lost her colonial trade;
and, after the Revolution, the commercial influence, which then became
supreme in the councils of England, was almost as hostile to Ireland
as that of the Tory landlords. A Parliament was summoned in Dublin, in
1698, for the express purpose of destroying Irish industry; and a year
later the Irish were prohibited from exporting their manufactured wool
to any other country whatever. Prohibitive duties were imposed on
Irish sail-cloth imported into England. Irish checked, striped, and
dyed linens were absolutely excluded from the colonies, and burdened
with a duty of 30 per cent. if imported into England. Ireland was not
allowed to participate in the bounties granted for the exportation of
these descriptions of linen from Great Britain to foreign countries.
In 1698, two petitions, from Folkestone and Aldborough, were presented
to Parliament, complaining of the injury done to the fishermen of
those towns "by the Irish catching herrings at Waterford and Wexford,
and sending them to the Straits, and thereby forestalling and ruining
petitioners' markets"; and there was even a party in England who
desired to prohibit all fisheries on the Irish shore except by boats
built and manned by Englishmen.

Not only were the Irish prevented from earning money, but they were
forced to pay large sums to the mistresses of English kings. Lecky
tells us that the Duke of Saint Alban's, the bastard son of Charles
II., enjoyed an Irish pension of L800 a year. Catherine Sedley, the
mistress of James II., had anothe