the soil were always kept in a state of the greatest poverty, being quite at the mercy of their immediate landlord. Those who had leases were indeed a little better off; but very few had; nearly all were tenants at will; and the landlord made them pay whatever he pleased. This state of things, which affected both Protestants and Catholics, existed in every part of Ireland during the whole of this century, and continued far into the next.

Other causes contributed to the prevailing depression. Towards the middle of the century, there was a very general movement among landlords, both great and small, to turn the land to pasture; for they found it more profitable to graze and sell cattle than to let the land for tillage; and thousands of poor cottiers were turned off in order that the land might be converted into great grazing farms. Near many of the villages in various parts of Ireland were "Commons," stretches of grassy upland or bog which were free to the people to use for grazing or for cutting turf, and formed one of their chief ways of living. They had belonged to them time out of mind, being in fact the remains of the Commons Land of ancient days (p. 47); but about this period the landlords had begun to enclose them as private property, chiefly for grazing. The people had other reasons for discontent too. They complained that the landlords charged excessive rents for bogs; and the gentry everywhere managed to evade the tithes payable to the ministers of the Established Church, which in consequence fell chiefly on the very poorest of the people. In addition to all these was the general want of employment due to the loss of trade of every kind, already referred to, which drove the peasantry to depend on land as almost their sole means of subsistence.

At last the people, with some wild notions of redressing their grievances, began to combine in various secret oath-bound societies, by which the country was for many years greatly disturbed. Of these the most noteworthy were the Whiteboys-so called because they wore white shirts over their coats when out on their nightly excursions-who were confined chiefly to the counties of Waterford, Cork, Limerick, and Tipperary. The movement was not sectarian; and it was not directed against the government, but against the oppression of individuals. The Whiteboys rose up in the first instance (in 1761) against the enclosure of commons, and persons of different religions joined them; for all suffered equally from the encroachments of the landlords and Catholics as well as Protestants fell under their vengeance. They traversed the country at night, levelling all the new fences that enclosed the commons, and digging up pasture land to force tillage: whence they at first got the name of Levellers. But they soon went beyond their original designs, setting themselves up as redressers of all sorts of grievances; and they committed terrible outrages on those who became obnoxious to them. Sometimes they took people out of their beds in winter, and immersed them naked up to the chin in a pit of water full of briars. At length they became so troublesome that a large force was sent, in 1762, to suppress them, under the marquis of Drogheda, who fixed his headquarters at Clogheen in Tipperary. The parish priest, Father Nicholas Sheehy, was accused of enrolling Whiteboys, and a reward was offered for his arrest; but he, earnestly denying the charge, surrendered, and was tried in Dublin and acquitted. He was immediately re-arrested on a charge of murdering one of his accusers, and put on his trial

this time in Clonmel; and on the evidence of the selfsame witnesses, who had been disbelieved in Dublin, as persons well known to be of bad character, he was convicted and hanged. Father Sheehy asserted his innocence to the last; the people considered him a martyr, and his execution caused fearful excitement.

In Ulster there were similar secret associations among the Protestant peasantry, brought about by causes of much the same kind as those of the south. One main ground of complaint was that every man was forced to give six days' work in the year, and six days' work of a horse, in the making or repairing of roads, which the gentry made full use of, while they themselves contributed nothing. Those who banded together against this were called "Hearts of Oak." Another association, the "Hearts of Steel," rose in 1769, against unjust and exorbitant rents; for the people of Ulster were as much oppressed as those of Munster by middlemen, who were here commonly known as "Forestallers." These "Oakboys" and "Steelboys," not content with their original objects, set themselves to redress various abuses about land, like their brethren in the south; and they also opposed the payment of tithes, which had been lately very much increased in Ulster. The oppression of the northern peasantry by the gentry caused a great emigration of the best of the people to New England, or rather increased the emigration begun more than half a century before; and when, a little later, the war broke out between England and the United States, the most determined and dangerous of the troops who fought against the English were the sturdy expatriated Presbyterians of Ulster, and the descendants of those who had emigrated on account of religious persecution and the

There

destruction of the wool trade (pp. 314, 397). were many other secret societies at this time and for long afterwards, culminating later on in the most cele brated of all, the United Irishmen .

Meantime, through all this trouble, the contest of the two parties in parliament went on without the least cessation. The Court Party were strong, and continued to purchase members to their side by various corrupt means; but the Patriots were sleepless and vigilant, and never gave the government a day's rest. Pensions constituted one of the principal forms of bribery. Large pensions were given to numbers of persons who had done nothing to earn them; and some were bestowed on favourites by the English privy council and charged to Ireland without any reference to the Irish government; so that the Pension List had grown to enormous proportions. This corrupt and ruinous pension list was vehemently attacked by the Patriots under the lead of a great man, Henry Flood,* who was aided

* At this time three great Irishmen, who for years played an important part in Irish affairs, began their career:-Henry Flood, born near Kilkenny, 1732, died 1791; Henry Grattan, born in Dublin, 1746, the son of the recorder, died 1820; Edmund Burke, born in Dublin in 1730, died 1797.

Burke, who figured in the English parliament, was one of the greatest political philosophers that ever lived. He began his public life in 1765, as private secretary to Lord Rockingham, the English prime minister, and in the following year he was elected member for Wendover. In 1774 he became member for Bristol. He opposed the American war; and on this question, as well as on those of the French revolution, and the Stamp Act, he wrote powerful pamphlets, and made a series of splendid speeches. He lifted himself above the prejudices of the times, and all his life advocated the emancipation of the Catholics.

Grattan was, perhaps, Ireland's most brilliant orator and one of

by the growing eloquence of a still more celebrated patriot, Henry Grattan, then a very young man, and

Henry Flood. From Barrington's "Historic Memoirs," II., 106.

not yet in parliament. But, although they fully ex

her purest and greatest patriots. He began his parliamentary life in 1775, at twenty-nine years of age, as member for Charlemont; and his very first speech was in opposition to the pensions of two absentees. In oratorical power, Flood was second only to Grattan.