beth, the bulk
of the population remained on the soil. To leave the land was to die.
They clung to it amid sufferings too shocking to dwell on;[9] they
clung to it under such a serfhood as made the rapacity of their
conquerors interested in retaining them on the soil. They clung to it
from necessity and from love. They multiplied on it with the rapidity
of the reckless. Yet they retained hope, the hope of restitution and
vengeance. The mad ferocity of Parsons and Borlace hastened the
outbreak of 1641. That insurrection gave back to the native his
property and his freedom, but compelled him to fight for it--first,
against the loyalists; next, against the traitors; and lastly, against
the republicans. After a struggle of ten years, distinguished by the
ability of the Council of Kilkenny, and the bravery of Owen Roe and his
followers, the Irish sunk under the abilities and hosts of Cromwell.
Those who felt his sway might well have envied the men who conquered
and died in the breach of Clonmel, or fell vanquished or betrayed at
Letterkenny and Drogheda. During the insurrection of 1641, the royal
government, at once timid and tyrannical, united with the sordid
capitalists of London to plunder the Irish of their lands and liberty,
if not to exterminate them.[10] In order to effect this, a system of
unparalleled lying was set afoot against the natives of this kingdom.
The violence which naturally attended the sudden resumption of property
by an ignorant, excited, and deeply wronged people, was magnified into
a national propensity to throat-cutting. Exaggerations the most
barefaced were received throughout England. Deaths, which the
English-minded Protestant, the Rev. Mr. Warner, has ascertained to have
been under 12,000--reckoning deaths from hardships along with those by
the sword--were rated in England at 150,000, and by John Milton at
616,000.[11] No wonder the English nation looked upon us as bloody
savages; and no wonder they looked approvingly at the massacres and
confiscations of the Lord Protector. But the Irish deemed they were
free from crime in resuming by force of arms the land which arms had
taken from them; they regarded the bloodshed of '41 as a deplorable
result of English oppression; they fought with the hearts of resolved
patriots till 1651.

The restoration of the Stuarts was hailed as the restoration of their
rights. They were woefully disappointed. A compromise was made between
the legitimists and the rep