CAULFIELD 445 perty destroyed, his looms and fürniture burnt, and his family fled by the light of the flames to seek some other asylum until they could escape from the province. The unfortunate fugitives, with their half naked wives and children, explored their way to Connaught and Munster, the catholic provinces; and, as they begged their sus- tenance on the journey, told their tales of woe, exciting the sympathy and resentment of their catholic brethren. This migration to the west and south, received a new con struction from the protestant magistrates and gentry of those provinces, namely that the popish defenders of the north were marching to cut their throats; and immedi- ately the honses of the catholic peasantry were searched for arms, and their pitchforks, scythes, reaping hooks, and other manual instruments of husbandry taken away, as weapons of massacre. Such a severity, wholly unpro- voked by any symptom of disloyalty or tumult; and from their protestant landlords, magistrates, and neighbours, naturally produced alarm amongst those poor ignorant persons, and roused them to a fellow-feeling with the northern defenders, hundreds of whom daily attested to them the cruelties they had experienced previous to their expulsion from their native homes; and hence the source of defenderism, nightly meetings, secret oaths, plunder for arms, and seditious conspiracies, which, in succession, every where began to infest the whole country; and which were met on the other side by severe laws, domi- ciliary visits, military executions, and arbitrary transpor- tations, without the semblance of law, or form of trial, carried on at midnight, by the magistrates of the country, aided by parties of horse and foot. These transactions were detailed with the most aggra- vating comments. The combustibles already collected in the country from the details of the French revolution and French victories; from the proceedings of the corresponding society in England; and from the wide and gratuitous distribution of Tom Paine's Rights of Man, to the number of some
