The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times by James Godkin
page 290 of 490 (59%)
page 290 of 490 (59%)
![]() | ![]() |
|
their leases fall into their hands, tie up their tenants from tillage;
and this is one of the main causes why so many venture to go into foreign service at the hazard of their lives if taken, because they cannot get land to till at home.' My readers should remember that the industrious, law-abiding, bible-loving, God-fearing people, who were thus driven by oppression from the fair fields of Ulster, which they had cultivated, and the dwellings which they had erected, to make way for sheep and cattle--because it was supposed by the landlords that sheep and cattle paid better--were the descendants of British settlers who came to the country under a royal guarantee _of freeholds and permanent tenures_. Let them picture to their minds this fine race of honest, godly people, rack-rented, crushed, evicted, heart-broken--men, women, and children--Protestants, Saxons, cast out to perish as the refuse of the earth, by a set of landed proprietors of their own race and creed; and learn from this most instructive fact that, if any body of men has the power of making laws to promote its own interest, no instincts of humanity, no dictates of religion, no restraints of conscience can be relied upon to keep them from acting with ruthless barbarity, and doing more to ruin their country than a foreign invader could accomplish by letting loose upon it his brutal soldiers. How much more earnestly would Boulter have pleaded with the prime minister of England on behalf of the wretched people of Ulster if he could have foreseen that ere long those Presbyterian emigrants, with the sense of injustice and cruel wrong burning in their hearts, would be found fighting under the banner of American independence--the bravest and fiercest soldiers of freedom which the British troops encountered in the American war. History is continually repeating itself, yet how vainly are its lessons taught! The same legal power of extermination |
|