ord did nothing for them. They built their own mud
hovels, planted their hedges, dug their ditches. They were half naked,
half starved, utterly destitute of all providence and of all education,
liable at any time to be turned adrift from their holdings, ground to
the dust by three great burdens--rack-rents, paid not to the landlord
but to the middleman; tithes, paid to the clergy--often the absentee
clergy--of the church to which they did not belong; and dues, paid to
their own priests" ("Hist, of Ireland," vol. i., pp. 214-215, ed. 1892).
[T.S.]]

But when the 'squire turns farmer and merchant himself, all the good
money he gets from abroad, he will hoard up or send for England, and
keep some poor tailor or weaver and the like in his own house, who will
be glad to get bread at any rate.

I should never have done if I were to tell you all the miseries that we
shall undergo if we be so foolish and wicked as to take this CURSED
COIN. It would be very hard if all Ireland should be put into one scale,
and this sorry fellow Wood into the other, that Mr. Wood should weigh
down this whole kingdom, by which England gets above a million of good
money every year clear into their pockets, and that is more than the
English do by all the world besides.

But your great comfort is, that as His Majesty's patent does not oblige
you to take this money, so the laws have not given the crown a power of
forcing the subjects to take what money the King pleases: For then by
the same reason we might be bound to take pebble-stones or cockle-shells
or stamped leather for current coin, if ever we should happen to live
under an ill prince, who might likewise by the same power make a guinea
pass for ten pounds, a shilling for twenty shillings, and so on, by
which he would in a short time get all the silver and gold of the
kingdom into his own hands, and leave us nothing but brass or leather or
what he pleased. Neither is anything reckoned more cruel or oppressive
in the French government than their common practice of calling in all
their money after they have sunk it very low, and then coining it anew
at a much higher value, which however is not the thousandth part so
wicked as this abominable project of Mr. Wood. For the French give their
subjects silver for silver and gold for gold, but this fellow will not
so much as give us good brass or copper for our gold and silver, nor
even a twelfth part of their worth.

Having said thus much, I will no