man, to be accompanied in a peculiar degree with counterbalancing evils,[1] the increased production of cattle, accompanied as it was by the enclosure of commons and the consolidation of small holdings, caused the terrible outbreak of the Whiteboys, in the same decade of the century which heard the first protests of the American Colonies against English misgovernment.
In many respects there was an analogy between the position of the American Colonies and that of Ireland. Both were governed by English colonists. In both there was a Royal Governor; in both there was an assembly with legislative powers more or less limited; and the Catholic population of Ireland was not, in theory at least, treated with much more political consideration than the Indian tribes which in the far West acknowledged the supremacy of George III. But there the analogy ceased, and nothing could afford a better proof of the difference between them than the forms which the resistance respectively took to the oppression under which they both conceived themselves to suffer. The citizens of Massachusetts, having the constitutional means of expressing their own discontent, only entered after many hesitations on a career of overt resistance, when every other weapon had failed: the Catholic peasantry of Ireland, trained to regard the law and the institutions of their country as a machine invented for the benefit of the Protestant minority, betook themselves at once to murder and outrage. Yet there was little to envy in the position of the Protestant minority. In the reign of Henry VII. the petty assembly which sat on the other side of St. George's Channel had begun to give signs of independent activity, and to prove the impossibility of two independent legislatures sitting, the one in Westminster, the other in Dublin. The first of many experiments was then made to adjust their conflicting jurisdictions, and the laws which took their name from the Lord-Deputy Poynings enacted that before any Parliament could be summoned, the Governor and Council of Ireland should certify to the King under the Great Seal of
- ↑ Mr. Gladstone, "Speech on Introduction of the Irish Church Bill," 1869.
