certainly on the worst and least cultivated portion of
their land, for the old castle had long since been taken from them, and
their broad acres transferred to others. Yet, though they tilled the
soil of which they so lately had been the lords, this little spot was
home: there the wife and mother loved her little ones as tenderly as in
the stately halls which her husband or his fathers had so lately
possessed. It was home, and if not the dear old home, it was, perhaps,
loved all the more for its sorrowful proximity to the ancestral
castle--for the faint hope that the rightful owner might still be
restored. But the trumpet had sounded the nation's doom. Confiscation
and banishment, wholesale plunder and untold iniquity, reigned supreme.
The name of the God of justice was invoked to sanction[492] the grossest
outrages upon justice; and men who professed to have freed their own
nation from the tyranny of kingcraft and of Popery, perpetrated a
tyranny on another nation, which has made the name of their leader a
byword and a curse.

The majority of the Catholic nobility and gentry were banished; the
remainder of the nation, thus more than decimated, were sent to
Connaught. On the 26th of September, 1653, all the property of the Irish
people was declared to belong to the English army and adventurers, "and
it was announced that the Parliament had assigned Connaught [America was
not then accessible] for the habitation of the Irish nation, whither
they must transplant, with their wives, and daughters, and children,
before 1st May following, under the penalty of death, if found on this
side of the Shannon after that day."[493] It must not be supposed that
this death penalty was a mere threat; I shall give instances to prove
the contrary. Any man, woman, or child who had disobeyed this order, no
matter from what cause, could be instantly executed in any way, by any
of these soldiers or adventurers, without judge, jury, or trial. It was
in fact constituting a special commission for the new comers to
murder[494] all the old inhabitants.

Connaught was selected for two reasons: first, because it was the most
wasted province of Ireland; and secondly, because it could be, and in
fact was, most easily converted into a national prison, by erecting a
_cordon militaire_ across the country, from sea to sea. To make the
imprisonment more complete, a belt four miles wide, commencing one mile
to the west of Sligo, and thence running along the