rs and discipline of war.' The chief
commissioners in Dublin had despatched assistant commissioners to the
provinces. The distribution which they made of the soil was nearly
as complete as that of Canaan among the Israelites; and this was
the model which the Puritans had always before their minds. Where a
miserable residue of the population was required to till the land
for its new owners, they were tolerated as the Gibeonites had been by
Joshua. Irish gentlemen who had obtained pardons were obliged to
wear a distinctive mark on their dress on pain of death. Persons of
inferior rank were distinguished by a black spot on the right cheek.
Wanting this, their punishment was the branding-iron or the gallows.

No vestige of the Catholic religion was allowed to exist. Catholic
lawyers and schoolmasters were silenced. All ecclesiastics were slain
like the priests of Baal. Three bishops and 300 of the inferior clergy
thus perished. The bedridden Bishop of Kilmore was the only native
clergyman permitted to survive. If, in mountain recesses or caves, a
few peasants were detected at mass, they were smoked out and shot.

Thus England got rid of a race concerning which Mr. Prendergast found
this contemporary testimony in a MS. in Trinity College library,
Dublin, dated 1615:--

'There lives not a people more hardy, active, and painful ... neither
is there any will endure the miseries of warre, as famine, watching,
heat, cold, wet, travel, and the like, so naturally and with such
facility and courage that they do. The Prince of Orange's excellency
uses often publiquely to deliver that the Irish are souldiers the
first day of their birth. The famous Henry IV., late king of France,
said there would prove no nation so resolute martial men as they,
would they be ruly and not too headstrong. And Sir John Norris was
wont to ascribe this particular to that nation above others, that he
never beheld so few of any country as of Irish that were idiots and
cowards, which is very notable.'

At the end of 1653, the parliament made a division of the spoil among
the conquerors and the adventurers; and, on September 26, an act was
passed for the new planting of Ireland by English. The Government
reserved for itself the towns, the church lands, and the tithes, the
established church, hierarchy and all, having been utterly abolished.
The four counties of Dublin, Kildare, Carlow, and Cork were also
reserved. The amount due to the adventurers was 360,