We are fallen upon evil days. Abroad thrones have been shaking sceptres and diadems are breakingdynasties are changing, and constitutions are vanishing away; at home all the time-honoured and time-nurtured must give way to the novel and ideal, for the spirit of change has breathed over all things, and while she rides in her rampant chariot against the throne of kings and the ark of God, all that we prize and love in the institutions of our country is to be dragged at her wheels, dishonoured in the dust. We are indeed fallen upon evil days; but of all the elements of evils that are now overshadowing the protestant interest of Ireland, there is none that in the desolation and utter hopelessness of despair, can compete with that giant evil, the threatened emigration of the protestant population. The number of Protestants, who have emigrated from Ireland during the last few years is as follows: in 1829, 12,000; in 1830, 21,000; 1831, 29,500; in 1832, 31,500, making a total of 94,000, during the short space of four years! Nor is this all-the evil is gradually increasing, the stream is widening its banks every successive year, so as to promise to exhaust before long the whole protestant population by its increasing drain; it is a slowly consuming and wasting malady that is working its noiseless and secret way through the land; and as consumption in the human form pales the cheek of beauty and prostrates the strength of youth, and then gradually and almost imVOL. I. perceptibly draws its victim unresisting to the grave, so is this evil, breaking and rendering powerless the Protestant interest, and promises so to waste its once mighty energies, that day after day it becomes weaker and weaker, and so will, almost without a struggle, vanish from the land. We have no desire to magnify this evil beyond its just dimensions, but we ask, of what use will be the Protestant press-the Conservative Clubs—our Tory Principles-even the Established Church herself, when the protestant population has emigrated?—of what use will be the protecting measure, when there are no Protestants to protect? It will, then, be mere idiotcy, or, at least, a waste of time and talent to devise plans for the support of the protestant interest, when those who are the bone and sinew of that body shall have abandoned the country for ever. The magnitude of this evil will stand revealed still more plainly when we reflect on the value of the character and principles of that class, First, they have invariably supported the interests of the landlords; and in all the strife, and storm, and civil commotion of three centuries, have been ever found maintaining, with their voices and with their lives, the property of the country; secondly, they have been found, by long experience, to be most conducive, by their industry, to the improvement of the country, and especially conducive, by their respect for, and support of the laws, to the maintenance of peace and tranquillity; thirdly, they have ever proved themselves to be, by feeling 39 true sources of safety, thinking that when matters are reduced to the worst, they will be able still to rely on that protection which they hope from England, and which they dream it will be her essential interest to give. In this manner they have been led to neglect encouraging such a protestant population as would effectually protect them from every possible danger, and have at this day reduced the country to a state almost beyond the hope of salvation. and religion, closely attached to English interests, and English connections, and, as such, are the surest support on which the property or the government can rely with any settled confidence for the continuance of the connection between the sister islands. Such is the true character of that Protestant population, which, like birds of passage at the blasts of winter, is migrating from the strife and treason and misery of this wretched island; there is no use in hiding the broad though unpalatable fact, that the protestant population are an English garrison which is holding this island in its allegiance to England-it is a garrison in a half-conquered and half-resisting country-and if it be once withdrawn, or if it deserts its banners, or if it emigrate, there will be neither safety for the property, nor security for the allegiance of this island, and the ascendancy of England is shi--The second was after the great revered to atoms! In taking, as we now propose, a concise review of the history of this emigration of the Protestants, and of the various causes which operate immediately in promoting it, it will be impossible to pass unnoticed that which is the principle which sets all the more immediate causes into life and motion -that principle is a mistaken confidence on the part of our proprietary, in the security of that settlement under which they derive their estates they are strangers, invaders, heretics, emphatically The Sasenach, in the eyes of the great body of the population, and yet, instead of encouraging another class to which they could securely look for assistance, instead of increasing the numbers and strength of their protestant tenantry, they throw themselves on the protection of England, and expect that protection from her which they ought to establish on their own estates. They have been impressed with a feeling, that under every possible circumstance, England must hold this island, and repress, with a strong hand, every thing that would subvert the present settlement of property, and looking thus to what they conceive to be necessity and the will of England, they think they may themselves cast aside all effort of their own, and in this spirit they have adopted and preserved a course of conduct calculated not only to weaken, but utterly to ruin their There have been three great settlements of Protestants in this country at different periods. The first one was after the rebellion of Tyrone was suppressed-Elizabeth had certainly made some valuable settlements, but it remained for James, on the lands forfeited in that rebellion, to make the first settlement of permanent value in Ireland bellion of 1641-the fearful atrocities of that terrible event, on the part of the natives against the settlers, drew down on their heads the vengeance of Cromwell, and he partitioned some of the lands thus forfeited, among the soldiers of his army-The third settlement was after the wars of the revolutions, when William paid some of his followers out of the lands forfeited by the adherents of the unhappy JamesSuch were the three great settlements of Protestants in Ireland, and though they were all important, their importance was of a very different kind.— The persons, to whom grants were made by Cromwell and William, are the ancestors of a very great portion of the present proprietors, a very great number of our gentry are descended from them, but these settlements do not appear to have extended to the lower orders of the population, at least to the same degree as the settlement by James, and the reason of this difference was, that James imposed conditions on his grants, which were omitted by Cromwell and William-those conditions were the introduction and location of a certain number of families upon every grant in proportion to its extent, and the families, thus located, are the predecessors of the great body of the lower order of Protestants in Ireland at the present day. Those conditions are thus described by Leland-“ The undertakers of 2,000 acres, were to build a castle, and enclose a strong and being steady and faithful men, they generally succeeded in protecting the property on which they resided. In the next place, these settlers introduced the good husbandry of England court-yard, or bawn, as it was called, within four years. The undertakers of 1,500 acres were to finish a house and bawn within two years. The undertakers of 1,000 acres were to enclose a bawn, for even this rude species of for--they very rapidly improved their tification was accounted no inconsiderable defence against the incursions of an Irish enemy. The first were to plant upon their lands, within three years, forty-eight able men of English or Scottish birth, to be reduced to twenty families; to keep a demesne of 600 acres in their own hands, to have four fee-farmers on 120 acres each; six lease-holders, each on 100 acres, and, on the rest, eight families of husbandmen, artificers, and cottagers. The others were under the like obligations-all were, for five years after the date of their patents, to reside upon their lands, either in person or by such agents as should be approved by the state, and to keep a sufficient quantity of arms for defence. The British and Servitors were not to alienate their lands to the mere Irish, or to demise any portion of them to such persons as should refuse to take the oaths to government." In compliance with these conditions, the settlers built large houses, or castles, on some eligible site on their new estates, and added generally a deep trench or other defence of sufficient strength to repel any tumultuous or sudden assault of the natives; they at the same time brought over large parties of English and Scotch farmers, mechanics and peasants, and induced them to settle on their grants, as near as possible to the house, or castle, of the proprietors; and having always supplied these persons with arms they had them ever in readiness for protection; this was a wise and prudent arrangement in two respects-in the first place, the natives, a wild and uncivilized race, used to congregate in the bogs, and woods, and mountains, and then rush in many hundreds on the habitations of the settlers; their object in such incursions was the murder of the Sasenach, the driving away and despoiling him of all his cattle, and the destruction of his tillage. Now, when such predatory attacks were made, the proprietor would alarm his settlers, and they would immediately turn out and proceed in a body, "a hosting against the Irishry," farms, and by their steady and industrious habits, and by their introduction of all the mechanical trades they soon introduced a quiet and settled state of society, widely different from the prædatory life which had been almost universal among the natives; indeed, many of the villages which these settlers then founded were the originals of some of our best inland towns at present, and the present state of the province of Ulster is an evidence of the wisdom of having thus encouraged the settlement of a protestant population. Happy it had been for this distracted country, and happy it had been for England, too, if she had carried into effect the measures which were for a time contemplated, of settling the provinces of Connaught and Munster in the same effective way. This civilized state of society was as opposite to the feelings and habits of the natives, as civilization is to this day to the Indian tribes of North America; they could not appreciate it, and naturally hated those who introduced it, as being strangers who had invaded their land and laid hold on their possessions. The hatred which they had always entertained for the English who had conquered and despoiled them, was now envenomed by a virulent bigotry against the new settlers, who were universally Protestants, and they named them both by one common appellation the Sasenach, a word expressive of the two ideas, which were most hateful to them, namely, a Protestant and Englishman. The following curious extract from one of our Irish authors (M'Mahon) will aptly illustrate their feeling :"After lawlessly distributing your estates, possessed for thirteen centuries or more by your illustrious families, whose antiquity and nobility, if equalled by any nation in the world, was surpassed by none but the immutable God of Abraham's people; after I say, seizing on your inheritances, and flinging them amongst their cocks, and crows, and rooks, wolves, lions, foxes, rams, bulls, hogs, and other birds and beasts of prey, or vesting them in the sweepings of their jails, their Smallwords, Dolittles, Barebones, Strangeways, Smarts, Sharps, Harts, Sterns, Churls, Savages; their Greens, Blacks, Browns, Greys, Whites; their Smiths, Carpenters, Brewers, Barbers, Taylors; their Tom-sons, John-sons, Will-sons, James-sons, Dick-sons; their Shorts, Longs, Lows, Flats, Squats; their Packs, Sacks, Stacks, and Jacks; and to complete the ingratitude and injustice they transported a cargo of notorious traitors to the divine Majesty among you, impiously calling the filthy lumber ministers of God's words!" Now, while this singular passage illustrates both the hostility of the natives against the settlers as English invaders, and their virulent bigotry against them as Protestants, it also proves that those settlers introduced all the common mechanical arts into the country, where previously they were totally unknown. Unhappily for the country, after some years of quiet and prosperous settlement, some of the new proprietors, dreaming that this quiet would not again be broken, and discovering that the natives would sometimes offer a larger rent than the settlers, began to admit them as tenants on their farms. This matter is noticed by Sir T. Phillips in his letter of Charles I., in these words: "They found the natives willing to overgive rather than remove, and that they could not reap half the profit by the British, which they do by the Irish, whom they use at their pleasure, never looking into the reasons which induced the natives to give more than they could raise-their assured hope that time might, by rebellion, relieve them from their heavy landlords, whom, in the mean time, they were contented to suffer under, though to their impoverishing and undoing." The able and honest man who wrote this account to his royal master, was himself a witness of what he wrote; he knew the motive of the landlords, and saw the object of the natives; and the terrible rebellion of 1641, which marked the reign of that monarch, showed the propriety of his opinions. Accurate details of that terrible rebellion and the fearful massacre of the settlers, have been transmitted to our times by three persons who witnessed it, and who, from their situation, had every means of ascertaining the precise truth; from their statement it would appear, that there never was evoked from hell a spirit of more fiendish malignancy, than that which actuated the natives, who sacrificed every tye and immolated every kindlier feeling of our nature to their virulent and bigotted hatred of the settlers. The effect of this event upon the numbers of the protestant population was truly disastrous; multitudes were coldly and deliberately massacred-multitudes perished on the roads and in the ditches, and multitudes emigrated to England; the total is stated by those who wrote immediately after the event, to have exceeded two hundred thousand Protestants! Such appears to have been the first important emigration of Protestants from Ireland, and the first great numerical deduction from the amounts of our Protestant population. Would that it had there ceased for ever! alas! the very same spirit and the very same causes do still exist, in this our day, and conspire to promote a similar emigration, The revolution of 1688 was perfected in Ireland just half a century after this rebellion, which, while it caused so extended an emigration of the Protestants of the inferior orders, promoted, in no measured degree, the absenteeism of the higher classes, for the horrors of popish bigotry, and the atrocities of frish hate, created this impression upon every class. During the period of the rebellion and the revolu tion much was effected by the government which saw plainly, especially in Cromwell's time, that the allegiance of Ireland depended on the strength of the protestant population, and much also was performed by the landlords, who now learned that the security of their estates depended altogether on the amount of their protestant tenantry; the beneficial effects of the encouragement which the Protestants then received were revealed during the struggle of the revolution, in which the indomitable conduct of the Protestants of Ireland proved so powerful an auxiliary to the cause of genuine liberty. Shortly after the agitation of that glorious struggle had subsided, and all had become calm and tranquil, when the Protestant settlers began to discover the true value of their newlyacquired possessions, and when the popish natives began to perceive the utter inability of their insurrectionary propensities, the whole face of the country presented a new and gratifying appearance; indeed, this period was the golden age of the Protestants of Ireland. The surface of the country was, in a great degree, divided by the various proprietors into large farms that varied from fifty to two hundred acres, (for they had not yet learned to give their tenants merely "a bit of land," which is as little suited to support a family, as it is to pay the rent';) the boundaries of these farms are still visible on the various estates, and, in general, they still bear the very names they then received; the labourers on those farms were the settlers themselves, assisted by such of the natives as were reclaimed from their wild and wandering habits. In such a state of things, when there was at the same time perfect internal tranquility, the whole frame of social life became improved, the resources of the country began to be developed, the lands were cleared of some of their endless woods, and numerous bogs and lakes were drained and reclaimed, and all things held out the prospect of as rapid improvement as has been ever known in any nation; the natives in vast numbers gradually forgot their prejudices amid the improvement that surrounded them, and, in adopting the manners and arts of the settlers, did also gradually and silently pass over to their religious profession. This state of prosperity, however, was not without its attendant evil; it lulled the proprietary to sleep; they had reaped in it the harvest of protection and quiet, which they had sought for in encouraging Protestant settlers of the lower orders, and peopling their estates with such faithful protectors, and the long period of nearly half a century's tranquillity which followed the revolution, appeared to their short sight as giving promise of there never again being any storm to trouble its smooth waters; they began to think that they had done enough for mere protection, and that as they were now secure from all disturbance in their estates, they might fairly turn their energies to increase the value of their possessions. It is to this mistaken sense of security-to this erroneous idea that they had done enough for protection, that we are to ascribe those injudicious steps which led to the prodigious emigration of Protestants, which took place during the last century. The commotions of Ireland have generally occurred at sufficient intervals to allow the generation that witnessed them to pass away, and to liberalise the feelings of the rising genetion. The long intervals of calm which followed the revolution had this effect, and led the proprietary into a system of setting their lands, which has been followed by the most disastrous consequences in the emigration of their Protestant tenantry ;-that system is thus described by a writer who witnessed it, and who published his pamphlet in 1745: Popish tenants are daily preferred and Protestant rejected, either for the sake of swelling a rental, or adding some more duties which Protestants will not submit to; but the greatest mischief, in this way, is done by a class of men, whom I will call land-jobbers. Land-jobbers have introduced for farmers the lower sort of papists who were employed formerly as labourers, while the lands were occupied by the substantial Protestants; but since potatoes have grown so much in credit, and burning the ground has become so fashionable, (a manure so easily and readily acquired,) these cottagers, who set no value on their labour, scorn to be servants any longer, but fancy themselves in the degree of masters as soon as they can accomplish the planting an acre of potatoes. One of this description, not being able singly to occupy any considerable quantity of ground, twelve or twenty of them, and sometimes more, cast their eyes on a plow-land occupied by many industrious Protestants, who, from a common ancestor, who planted them perhaps one hundred years before, have swarmed into so many stocks, built-houses, made many improvements, and nursed the land, in expectation of being favoured by their landlord in a new lease. These cottagers, seeing the flourishing condition of this colony, the warm plight of the houses, but especially the strong sod on the earth, made so by various composts collected with much care and toil, and which secures to them a long continuance of this beloved, destructive manure, made by burning the green sward, engage some neighbours to take this plowland, and all jointly bind themselves to become under-tenants to this land |
