For a great
number of years every writer, every public man, every Act of Parliament,
assumed that the English colony in Ireland was the Irish nation.
Denunciations of Papists, the "common enemy"--gross falsehoods about
their principles and acts--fears real or pretended, of their wicked,
bloodthirsty plots, thickly strewn in our path as we journey through
this dismal period of our history--reveal to us, as it were by accident,
that there was another people in this island, besides those whom the law
regarded as the nation; but they had no rights, they were outlaws--"the
Irish enemy." One hundred and fifty years ago Primate Boulter expressed
his belief that those outlaws made four-fifths of the population, and
the English colony only one-fifth; but the colonists held the rich
lands; the bulk of the people, who formed the real nation, were in the
bogs, the lonely glens, and on the sterile mountains, where agriculture
was all but impossible, except to the great capitalist. Capital they had
none, and they were forced to subsist, as best they could, on little
patches of tillage among the rocks, whose _debris_ made the land around
them in some sort susceptible of cultivation.
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