ork its own cure.]

[Sidenote: Extreme misery of the people.]

This condition of things might have been expected to work its own cure.
The earth will not support human life uncultivated, and men will not
labour without some reasonable hope that they will enjoy the fruit of
their labour. Anarchy, therefore, is usually shortlived, and perishes of
inanition. Unruly persons must either comply with the terms on which
alone they are permitted to subsist, and consent to submit to some kind
of order, or they must die. The Irish, however, were enabled to escape
from this most wholesome provision by the recklessness of the people,
who preferred any extremity of suffering to the endurance of the least
restraint, and by the tyranny under which the labouring poor were
oppressed. In England, the same hands were trained to hold the sword and
to hold the plough. The labourers and the artisans in peace were the
soldiers in war. In Ireland, labour was treated as disgraceful; the
chiefs picked out the strongest and fiercest of their subjects, and
trained them only to fight; the labourers were driven to the field as
beasts of burden, and compelled to work on the chance that the harvest
might be secured. By this precarious means, with the addition of the
wild cattle which roamed in thousands among the woods and bogs,
sufficient sustenance was extracted from the soil to support a scanty
population, the majority of whom were supposed to be the most wretched
specimens of human nature which could be found upon the globe. "What
common folk in all this world," the report says, "is so poor, so feeble,
so evil beseen in town and field, so bestial, so greatly oppressed and
trodden under foot, fares so evil, with so great misery, and with so
wretched life, as the common folk of Ireland? What pity is here, what
ruth is to report, there is no tongue that can tell, ne person that can
write. It passeth far the orators and muses all to shew the order of the
nobles, and how cruel they entreateth the poor common people. What
danger it is to the king against God to suffer his land, whereof he
bears the charge and the cure temporal, to be in the said misorder so
long without remedy. It were more honour to surrender his claim thereto,
and to make no longer prosecution thereof, than to suffer his poor
subjects always to be so oppressed, and all the nobles of the land to be
at war within themselves, always shedding of Christian blood without
remedy. The herd mu