n the pages of history. There were
many massacres behind it--massacres committed not to avenge wrongs, but
to accomplish them! The massacre of Protestants by Irish Catholics is
in itself no more hideous than the massacre of Irish Catholics by
Protestants. And was it strange that in their first chance at
retaliation, this half-civilized people treated their oppressors as
their oppressors had many, many times treated them? Could anything
else have been expected? especially when we learn that the Scotch
Presbyterians in Tyrone and Armagh immediately retaliated by murdering
thirty Irish Catholic families who were in no way implicated in the
horror!

Strafford's head had fallen in the first days of the Long Parliament;
then Archbishop Laud met the same fate, and finally the execution of
Charles I. at Whitehall, in 1649, put an end to the dreams of
liberation. {216} Almost the first thing to occupy the attention of
Cromwell was the settling of accounts with the Catholic rebels in
Ireland, who had for years been intriguing with the traitor King and
were even now plotting with the Pope's nuncio, Rinucini, for the return
of the exiled Prince Charles.

It required six years and 600,000 lives for Cromwell to inflict proper
punishment upon Ireland for these offences and the massacre of 1641; or
rather, to _prepare_ for the punishment which was now to begin, and for
which we shall search history in vain for a parallel! The heroic
Cromwellian scheme--which was carried out to the letter--was this: The
entire native population were, before May 1, 1654, to depart in a body
for Connaught, there to inhabit a small reservation in a desolate tract
between the Shannon and the sea, of which it was said by one of the
commissioners engaged in this business, "there was not wood enough to
burn, water enough to drown, nor earth enough to bury a man." They
must not go within two miles of the river, nor four miles of the sea, a
cordon of soldiers being permanently stationed with orders to shoot
{217} anyone who overstepped such limits. Any Irish who after the date
named were found east of the appointed line were to suffer death.
Resistance was hopeless. We hear of wild pleas for time, for a brief
delay to collect a few comforts, and make some provision for food and
shelter. But at the beating of the drum and blast of the trumpet, and
urged on by bayonets, the tide of wretched humanity flowed into
Connaught, delicately nurtured ladies and