nning.' The same eulogy would equally
apply to many of the English generals. Cruelty was their only crime.
The Irish rulers of those times, if not taken by surprise, felt at the
outbreak of open rebellion much as the army feels at the breaking
out of a war, in some country where plenty of prize money can be won,
where the looting will be rich and the promotion rapid. Relying with
confidence on the power of England and the force of discipline, they
knew that the active defenders of the Government would be victorious
in the end, and that their rewards would be estates. The more
rebellions, the more forfeited territory, the more opportunities to
implicate, ruin, and despoil the principal men of the hated race. The
most sober writer, dealing with such facts, cannot help stirring men's
blood while recording the deeds of the heroes who founded the English
system of government in Ireland, and secured to themselves immense
tracts of its most fertile soil. What then must be the effect of the
eloquent and impassioned denunciations of such writers as Mr.
Butt, Mr. A.M. Sullivan, and Mr. John Mitchell, not to speak of the
'national press'? Yet the most fiery patriot utters nothing stronger
on the English rule in Ireland than what the Irish may read in the
works of the greatest statesmen and most profound thinkers in England.
The evil is in the facts, and the facts cannot be suppressed because
they are the roots of our present difficulties. Mr. Darcy Magee, one
of the most moderate of Irish historians, writing far away from his
native land, not long before he fell by the bullet of the assassin--a
martyr to his loyalty--sketches the preliminaries of confiscation at
the commencement of this civil war.

In Munster, their chief instruments were the aged Earl of Cork, still
insatiable as ever for other men's possessions, and the president,
St. Leger: in Leinster, Sir Charles Coote. Lord Cork prepared 1,100
indictments against men of property in his province, which he sent to
the speaker of the Long Parliament, with an urgent request that
they might be returned to him, with authority to proceed against the
parties named as outlaws. In Leinster, 4,000 similar indictments
were found in the course of two days by the free use of the rack with
witnesses. Sir John Read, an officer of the king's bedchamber, and
Mr. Barnwall of Kilbrue, a gentleman of threescore and six, were among
those who underwent the torture. When these were the proceedings