Charles II
Ch. II., c. 26. The debates in the English House of Commons in 1778, in which year the most important legislative restrictions upon Irish trade were removed, throw much light upon the origin and operation of these laws. See especially the speeches of Lord North.
72 Clarendon, Continuation, § 959.
73 18 Ch. II., c. 2. An earlier act (15 Ch. II., c. 7) had prohibited the importation of fat cattle from Ireland between July and December.
74 Carte II., 321, 329, 337; Clarendon, Continuation, § 955-960; English Commons' Journals. For the dispute over the word "nuisance," see Pepys's Diary. There are some excellent remarks on the Bill in Roger Coke's Detection of the Court of England.
75 32 Ch. II., c. 2.
76 Carte (II., 393) says that Petty "bragged he had got witnesses who would have sworn through a three-inch board." He was accused before a Committee of the House of Commons and acquitted (Commons' Journals, II., 613, 653); but as the House was composed almost exclusively of "adventurers," whose interests were closely identified with his own, the acquittal does not carry much weight.
77 Political Arithmetic, chap. 4; Fitzmaurice's Life of Petty, p. 148.
78 Political Anatomy, chap. 15.
79 Ibid.
80 Fitzmaurice's Life of Petty, pp. 272, 273; et alibi, on the authority of several unpublished tracts of Petty. These tracts, of which the Speculum Hiberniæ is the most important, are in the Nelligan MS. in the British Museum. Though
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