least to endeavour it, before another Representative force you;
otherwise you cannot discharge your trust to God and man." And the
Appeal concludes with the following words: "Set the Land free from
oppression, and righteousness will be the Laws, Government, and
Strength of that People."

The Long Parliament, however, were too busy carrying English
civilisation into Ireland to heed his words. And yet surely there was
work enough for them to do in their own country, in which, as we have
already pointed out, since the reign of Henry the Seventh the condition
of the masses of the people had steadily worsened, and, as a natural
consequence, the number of beggars, "rogues and vagrants," despite
barbarous laws, involving their wholesale hanging, had steadily
increased. During the reign of James the First, in a pamphlet entitled
_Grievous Groans of the Poor_, published 1622, we hear the complaint
that "the number of the poor do daily increase." The only remedy the
then wise men of England could devise was to make the laws against them
still more severe. Consequently it was ordered that the first time such
people were apprehended they should be branded with the letter R, and if
subsequently again found begging or wandering they were "to suffer death
without benefit of Clergy." Yet such was their obstinacy that they still
increased in numbers; and that for the simple reason that the economic
or social causes of which they were but the inevitable outcome were not
removed.

During all this period, however, the country was developing, its
industry and commerce expanding, and its wealth increasing by leaps and
bounds; but in all this the "meaner sort," the Younger Brothers, the
disinherited masses, had neither lot nor share. Though Clarendon may
speak of the growing economical prosperity of the country during the