or, in more recent times, when men, and even women, have all but expired under the lash; no deeds of savage vengeance have ever exceeded those which were perpetrated daily and hourly in Ireland, before the rebellion of 1798.  For the sake of our common humanity I would that they could be passed over unrecorded; for the sake of our common humanity I shall record them in detail, for it may be that the terror of what men can become when they give way to unrestrained passions, may deter some of my fellow-creatures from allowing themselves to participate in or to enact such deeds of blood.  Historical justice, too, demands that they should be related.  Englishmen have heard much of the cruelties of Irish rebels at Wexford, which I shall neither palliate nor excuse.  Englishmen have heard but little of the inhuman atrocities which excited that insurrection, and prompted these reprisals.  And let it be remembered, that there are men still living who saw these cruelties enacted in their childhood, and men whose fathers and nearest relations were themselves subjected to these tortures.  To the Celt, so warm of heart and so tenacious of memory, what food this is for the tempter, who bids him recall, and bids him revenge, even now, these wrongs!  What wonder if passion should take the place of reason, and if religion, which commands him to suffer patiently the memory of injuries inflicted on others, often harder to bear than one’s own pain, should sometimes fail to assert its sway![577]

I shall give the account of these atrocities in the words of a Protestant historian first.  The Rev. Mr. Gordon writes thus, in his narrative of these fearful times:  “The fears of the people became so great at length, that they forsook their houses in the night, and slept (if, under such circumstances, they could sleep) in the ditches and the women were even delivered in that exposed condition, These facts were notorious at the time....  Some abandoned their house from fear of being whipped; and this infliction many persons appeared to fear more than death itself.  Many unfortunate men were strung up as it were to be hanged, but were let down now and then, to try if strangulation would oblige them to become informers.”  He then goes on to relate at length how the magistrates tortured smiths and carpenters at once, because it was supposed from their trade they must have made pikes; and how they, at last, professed to know a United Irishman by his face, and “never suffered any person whom they deigned to honour with this distinction, to pass off without convincing proof of their attention.”  He also mentions the case of a hermit named Driscoll, whose name and the same details of his sufferings are given in Clancy’s account of the insurrection.  This man was strangled three times, and flogged four times, because a Catholic prayer-book was found in his possession, on which it was supposed that he used to administer oaths of disloyalty.