word for this kind of execution,
_slaughtered_--and he, left alone, a boy, grows up characterless and
kills an archbishop. Every impetuous, impatient act is dragged before
the prejudiced mind. But when Mr. Froude is painting Sir Walter and
Spenser, blind no longer, he says: 'I regret--it is very sad to
think--that such things should ever have been!'"

Such was the cup from which Ireland drank even into the days of men
now living. Nor was this all. The rise of English manufactures
brought a new chapter of woes to Ireland. The Irish cattle trade had
been killed by an Act of Charles II. for the benefit of English
farmers. The Irish then took up the raising of wool and woolen
manufactures. A flourishing trade grew up. An English law destroyed
it. In succession the same greed killed the cotton, the glovemaking,
the glassmaking, and the brewing trades. These were reserved for the
English maker and merchant. These crimes upon Irish industry
surpassed a thousand-fold the later English attempts upon the
industries of the American colonies.

Under the Code, and through the extreme poverty produced thereby,
substantially all the land of Ireland passed out of the hands of the
people. They became mere serfs upon the soil. Their tribute was paid
through a rapacious agent to a foreign landlord. The improvement of
the land by the labor of the tenant brought increase of rent. There
was no fixity of tenure of the land. It was held at the will of the
agent, reflecting the rapacity of the non-resident landlord. Upon
these holdings the principal crop was the potato. A failure of this
crop was a failure to pay rent, eviction on the roadside, and
starvation. The results, after the enactment of the Penal Code, and
during the greater part of the eighteenth century, are thus described
by Goldwin Smith: "On such a scene of misery as the abodes of the
Irish cotters the sun has rarely looked down. Their homes were the
most miserable hovels, chimneyless, filthy. Of decent clothing they
were destitute. Their food was the potato; sometimes they bled their
cattle and mixed the blood with sorrel. The old and sick were
everywhere dying by cold and hunger, and rotting amidst filth and
vermin. When the potato failed, as it often did, came famine, with
disease in its train. Want and misery were in every face, the roads
were spread with dead and dying, there was sometimes none to bear the
dead to the grave, and they were buried in the fields and ditches