In fact the Cromwellian commissioners did nothing more than carry out fully the principles of our present land code.  Nine-tenths of the soil of Ireland are held by tenants at will.  It is constantly argued in the leading organs of English opinion, that the power of the landlords to resume possession of their estates, and turn them into pastures, evicting all the tenants, is essential to the rights of property.  This has been said in connection with the great absentee proprietors.  According to this theory of proprietorship, the only one recognised by law, Lord Lansdowne may legally spread desolation over a large part of Kerry; Lord Fitzwilliam may send the ploughshare of ruin through the hearths of half the county Wicklow; Lord Digby, in the King’s County, may restore to the bog of Allen vast tracts reclaimed during many generations by the labour of his tenants; and Lord Hertfort may convert into a wilderness the district which the descendants of the English settlers have converted into the garden of Ulster.  If any or all of those noblemen took a fancy, like Colonel Bernard of Kinnitty or Mr. Allen Pollok, to become graziers and cattle-jobbers on a gigantic scale, the Government would be compelled to place the military power of the state at their disposal, to evict the whole population in the queen’s name, to drive all the families away from their homes, to demolish their dwellings, and turn them adrift on the highway, without one shilling compensation.  Villages, schools, churches would all disappear from the landscape; and, when the grouse season arrived, the noble owner might bring over a party of English friends to see his ‘improvements!’ The right of conquest so cruelly exercised by the Cromwellians is in this year of grace a legal right; and its exercise is a mere question of expediency and discretion.  There is not a landlord in Ireland who may not be a Scully if he wishes.  It is not law or justice, it is not British power, that prevents the enactment of Cromwellian scenes of desolation in every county of that unfortunate country.  It is self-interest, with humanity, in the hearts of good men, and the dread of assassination in the hearts of bad men, that prevent at the present moment the immolation of the Irish people to the Moloch of territorial despotism.  It is the effort to render impossible those human sacrifices, those holocausts of Christian households, that the priests of feudal landlordism denounce so frantically with loud cries of ‘confiscation.’

The ‘graces’ promised by Charles I. in 1628 demonstrate the real wretchedness of the country to which they were deceitfully offered, and from which they were treacherously withdrawn.  From them we learn that the Government soldiers were a terror to more than the king’s enemies, that the king’s rents were collected at the sword’s point, and that numerous monopolies and oppressive taxes impoverished the country.  There was little security for estates