marching behind that _beau chevalier_ Owen Roe O'Neill to battle and
victory. O'Neill, a general famous through Europe, the one man who might
have measured equal swords with Cromwell, was removed by poison, and
then came the massacres. In eleven years, Sir William Petty assures us,
616,000 out of a total population of 1,466,000 perished by the sword or
by starvation. For the remainder the policy of root and branch
extermination was abandoned in favour of a policy of State-aided
migration and emigration. As an alternative to hell the Irish were
deported to Connaught or the Barbadoes. Henceforth there were to be
three provinces of loyal English, and one of rebelly Irish. This again
was not a radiant success. The transformation of the Cromwellian settler
has been indicated; if you were to search for him to-day you would
probably find him President of the local branch of the United Irish
League. The story repeats itself period after period. The Penal Laws did
not protestantise Ireland. The eighteenth century may be said to mark
the lowest ebb of national life, but the tide was to turn. After Aughrim
and the Boyne, the new device of England was to sacrifice everything to
the "garrison." "Protestant Ireland," as Grattan put it, "knelt to
England on the necks of her countrymen." In one aspect the garrison were
tyrants; in another they were slaves. They were at once oppressors and
oppressed. There was a sort of "deal" between them and the English
Government by which the public welfare was to be sacrificed to the
English Government, the Irish Catholics to the "garrison." A vile
programme, but subtle and adroit, it bore its unnatural fruit of
legislation, passed by the Westminster Parliament and the Dublin
Garrison Parliament alike, for the destruction of every manufacturing
and commercial interest in Ireland that was thought to conflict with a
similar interest in England. But another debacle has to be chronicled.
Out of the very baseness of this regime a new patriotism was begotten.
The garrison, awakening abruptly to the fact that it had no country,