er foreigners were "hospitably
received, entertained and educated, furnished with books," etc., all
gratuitously.

Up to the middle of the sixteenth century, I find, after careful study
in the Leabhar-Gabhala, the Annals of the Four Masters, of
Clonmacnoise, of Loch Ce, and other historical records, the same
continued apparent prosperity, but after the English took possession
of the larger portion of the country, only the records of anarchy,
despotism, and misery. Before the Reformation, or so long as the
English settlers remained within the pale, Ireland had been as happy
as Ultramontanism would allow, but from the accession of Elizabeth and
the consequent attempted enforcement of a new theology, against the
wishes of the people, a fearful succession of despotism is revealed.
To force Protestantism on the Irish, Catholicism was put down by the
most stringent laws--the torture chamber never empty, the scaffold
rarely free from executions, the seaports closed, and manufactures
forbidden to be exported; "black laws" of a most iniquitous character,
exceeding in ingenuity the devices of Tilly or Torquemada, placed on
the statute book. The punishment for being a recusant Catholic, or
Papist, was death, and it is a known fact that one Protestant
commander, Sir William Cole, of Fermanagh, made his soldiers massacre
in a short period "seven thousand of the vulgar sort," as Borlase
informs us. Elsewhere the English behaved in the same manner, and on
the authority of Bishop Moran it is asserted that the Puritans of the
North shot down Catholics as wild beasts, and made it their business
"to imbrue their swords in the hearts' blood of the male children."
Mr. and Mrs. S.C. Hall, in their valuable work on Ireland, state that
the possessors of the whole province of Ulster were driven out under
pain of mortal punishment from their homes and lands, without roof
over their heads, to be pent up in the most barren portion of
Connaught, where to pass a certain boundary line was instant death
without trial, and where it was commonly said, "There is not wood
enough to hang a man, water enough to drown him, nor earth enough to
bury him." One hundred thousand Catholics were sold as slaves to the
West Indian and North American planters by the public authority of the
Cromwellian government. Such was the way these Christians showed their
love for their fellow Christians, and can it be wondered that ever
since than there has been one continual su