as a truth, that there are in Ireland four and a-half millions of barren acres, the greater portion of which would richly, and promptly, repay for their reclamation.  Yet the Government Bill for beginning that reclamation was withdrawn by the Prime Minister, and no single voice was raised in favour of going on with it; moreover, he said his reason for withdrawing it was, the opposition which the House of Lords offered to it.  Yes; they would have no reclamation of Irish lands, but they would submit to bear increased taxation in order to send the Celtic race by the million to delve in Canada!—­yet, even for that it became the Irish people to be duly grateful, inasmuch as it was a decided improvement upon the older colonization scheme of “To h——­or Connaught."[287]

The colonization scheme met with little or no support in Ireland.  It was suspected.  It was regarded as a plan for getting rid of the Celt by wholesale.  A Protestant gentleman, Mr. Thomas Mulock, thus comments on the memorial:  “And is it come to this, O ye lords and gentlemen! representatives of the Irish party, with prospective adhesions after the Easter holidays from the vast majority of Irish Protestant proprietors,—­do you avow yourselves to be in the position of landowners, who stand in no relation of aristocracy or leadership, government or guidance, succour or solace to millions of the people, who famish on the territorial possessions from which you derive your titles, your importance, your influence, your wealth.  Has confiscation been mellowed into the legal semblance of undisputed succession, only to bring about a state of things which the most ruthless ravagers of nations never permanently perpetrated?"[288]

The memorial was extensively circulated.  Amongst many others, one was sent to the Right Rev. Dr. Maginn, Coadjutor Bishop of Derry.  He replied in terms scathing as they were indignant.  The following is an extract from his letter:—­“In sober earnestness, gentlemen, why send your circular to a Catholic bishop?  Why have the bare-faced impudence to ask me to consent to the expatriation of millions of my co-religionists and fellow-countrymen?  You, the hereditary oppressors of my race and my religion,—­you, who reduced one of the noblest peoples under heaven to live in the most fertile island on earth on the worst species of a miserable exotic, which no humane man, having anything better, would constantly give to his swine or his horses;—­you, who have made the most beautiful island under the sun a land of skulls, or of ghastly spectres;—­you are anxious, I presume, to get a Catholic bishop to abet your wholesale system of extermination—­to head in pontificals the convoy of your exiles, and thereby give the sanction of religion to your atrocious scheme.  You never, gentlemen, laboured under a more egregious mistake than by imagining that we could give in our adhesion to your principles, or could have any, the least confidence, in anything proceeding