clique and its Houses of Parliament a mere tool in the clique's hands.
The Parliament no longer represented the national will, since it did
really nothing but ratify what the English party asked for, or what the
King's ministers in England instructed should be made law.

Irish manufactures were ruined by legislation; the commerce of Ireland
was destroyed by the same means; her schools became practically
penitentiaries to the Catholic children, who were compelled to receive a
Protestant instruction; her agriculture was degraded to the degree that
cattle could not be exported nor the wool sold or shipped from her own
ports to other countries; her towns swarmed with beggars and thieves,
forced there by the desolation which prevailed in the country districts,
where people starved by the wayside, and where those who lived barely
kept body and soul together to pay the rents of the absentee landlords.

Swift has himself, in the pamphlets printed in the present volume, given
a fairly accurate and no exaggerated account of the miserable condition
of his country at this time; and his writings are amply corroborated by
other men who might be considered less passionate and more temperate.

The people had become degraded through the evil influence of a
contemptuous and spendthrift landlord class, who considered the tenant
in no other light than as a rent-paying creature. As Roman Catholics
they found themselves the social inferiors of the ruling Protestant
class--the laws had placed them in that invidious position. They were
practically without any defence. They were ignorant, poor, and
half-starved. Thriftless, like their landlords, they ate up in the
autumn what harvests they gathered, and begged for their winter's
support. Adultery and incest were common and bred a body of lawless
creatures, who herded together like wild beasts and became dangerous