stocked with cattle, and had no other inhabitants on their land than
so many cottiers as were necessary to look after their sheep and black
cattle, '_so that, in some of the finest counties, in many places
there is neither house nor cornfield to be seen in ten or fifteen
miles' travelling_, and daily in some counties many gentlemen, as
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
is still possessed by the Irish landlords after sixty-nine years of
imperial legislation. Our hardy, industrious people, naturally as well
disposed to royalty as any people in the world, are st