[50] The original Navigation Act treated Ireland on an equal footing with England.  The act, however, was succeeded in 1663 by that of 15 Charles II c. 7, in which it was declared that no European articles, with few exceptions, could be imported into the colonies unless they had been loaded in English-built vessels at English ports.  Nor could goods be brought from English colonies except to English ports.  By the Acts 22 and 23 of Charles II. c. 26 the exclusion of Ireland was confirmed, and the Acts 7 and 8 of Will.  III. c. 22, passed in 1696, actually prohibited any goods whatever from being imported to Ireland direct from the English colonies.  These are the reasons for Swift’s remark that Ireland’s ports were of no more use to Ireland’s people “than a beautiful prospect to a man shut up in a dungeon.” [T.  S.]

[51] See note on page 137 of vol. vi of this edition.  “The Drapier’s Letters.” [T.  S.]

[52] Lecky quotes from the MSS. in the British Museum, from a series of letters written by Bishop Nicholson, on his journey to Derry, to the Archbishop of Canterbury.  The quotation illustrates the truth of Swift’s remark.  “Never did I behold,” writes Nicholson, “even in Picardy, Westphalia, or Scotland, such dismal marks of hunger and want as appeared in the countenances of the poor creatures I met with on the road.”  In the “Intelligencer” (No.  VI, 1728) Sheridan wrote:  “The poor are sunk to the lowest degrees of misery and poverty—­their houses dunghills, their victuals the blood of their cattle, or the herbs of the field.”  Of the condition of the country thirty years later, the most terrible of pictures is given by Burdy in his “Life of Skelton”:  “In 1757 a remarkable dearth prevailed in Ireland....  Mr. Skelton went out into the country to discover the real state of his poor, and travelled from cottage to cottage, over mountains, rocks, and heath....  In one cabin he found the people eating boiled prushia [a weed with a yellow flower that grows in cornfields] by itself for their breakfast, and tasted this sorry food, which seemed nauseous to him.  Next morning he gave orders to have prushia gathered and boiled for his own breakfast, that he might live on the same sort of food with the poor.  He ate this for one or two days; but at last his stomach turning against it, he set off immediately for Ballyshannon to buy oatmeal for them....  One day, when he was travelling in this manner through the country, he came to a lonely cottage in the mountains, where he found a poor woman lying in child-bed with a number of children about her.  All she had, in her weak, helpless condition to keep herself and her children alive, was blood and sorrel boiled up together.  The blood, her husband, who was a herdsman, took from the cattle of others under his care, for he had none of his own.  This was a usual sort of food in that country in times of scarcity, for they bled the cows for that purpose, and thus the same cow often afforded both milk and blood....  They were obliged, when the carriers were bringing the meal to Pettigo, to guard it with their clubs, as the people of the adjacent parishes strove to take it by force, in which they sometimes succeeded, hunger making them desperate.” (Burdy’s Life of Skelton.  “Works,” vol. i, pp. lxxx-lxxxii.) [T.  S.]