I found the aged of strict morals,
    The historians recording truth—­
    Each good, each benefit that I have sung,
    In Ireland I have seen.”

Such is the statement of King Aldfred, and the Venerable Bede informs us that in Ireland, Saxons and other foreigners were “hospitably received, entertained and educated, furnished with books,” etc., all gratuitously.

Up to the middle of the sixteenth century, I find, after careful study in the Leabhar-Gabhala, the Annals of the Four Masters, of Clonmacnoise, of Loch Ce, and other historical records, the same continued apparent prosperity, but after the English took possession of the larger portion of the country, only the records of anarchy, despotism, and misery.  Before the Reformation, or so long as the English settlers remained within the pale, Ireland had been as happy as Ultramontanism would allow, but from the accession of Elizabeth and the consequent attempted enforcement of a new theology, against the wishes of the people, a fearful succession of despotism is revealed.  To force Protestantism on the Irish, Catholicism was put down by the most stringent laws—­the torture chamber never empty, the scaffold rarely free from executions, the seaports closed, and manufactures forbidden to be exported; “black laws” of a most iniquitous character, exceeding in ingenuity the devices of Tilly or Torquemada, placed on the statute book.  The punishment for being a recusant Catholic, or Papist, was death, and it is a known fact that one Protestant commander, Sir William Cole, of Fermanagh, made his soldiers massacre in a short period “seven thousand of the vulgar sort,” as Borlase informs us.  Elsewhere the English behaved in the same manner, and on the authority of Bishop Moran it is asserted that the Puritans of the North shot down Catholics as wild beasts, and made it their business “to imbrue their swords in the hearts’ blood of the male children.”  Mr. and Mrs. S.C.  Hall, in their valuable work on Ireland, state that the possessors of the whole province of Ulster were driven out under pain of mortal punishment from their homes and lands, without roof over their heads, to be pent up in the most barren portion of Connaught, where to pass a certain boundary line was instant death without trial, and where it was commonly said, “There is not wood enough to hang a man, water enough to drown him, nor earth enough to bury him.”  One hundred thousand Catholics were sold as slaves to the West Indian and North American planters by the public authority of the Cromwellian government.  Such was the way these Christians showed their love for their fellow Christians, and can it be wondered that ever since than there has been one continual succession of uprisings in that most unhappy country?  As the sinew of Ireland’s people in this country were driven by necessity, fleeing from the terrors of starvation and insufficient existence at home, so were the best of the race in the two previous centuries