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 still crowding emigrant ships in all our ports, deserting their country with the same bitter feelings that animated the Ulster men a century ago, hating our Government with a mortal hatred, and ready to fight against it under a foreign flag!  We have no Primate Boulter now in the Protestant hierarchy to plead the cause of an unprotected tenantry; but we have the press, which can concentrate upon the subject the irresistible force of public opinion.

As a churchman, Primate Boulter naturally regarded the land question in its bearings on the interests of the Establishment.  Writing to Sir Robert Walpole in 1737 he said that he had in vain represented to the landlords that, by destroying the tithe of agistment, they naturally discouraged tillage, lessened the number of people, and raised the price of provisions.  By running into cattle they caused the young men to enlist in foreign service for bread, there being no employment for them at home, ’where two or three hands can look after some hundreds of acres stocked with cattle.’  And by this means, said the primate, ’a great part of our churches are neglected;