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 408 CAULFIELD originating in the prejudice and hostility of the Englislr settlers in that country under successive reigns, who pos- sessed the confiscated estates of the old rebellious chiefs, (many of them of English descent,) who resisted English domination; and more especially the followers of Crom- well and William III. who, having obtained the ruling power, seemed determined to wreak interminable ven- geance on the devoted Irish, for their, perhaps, mistaken, but certainly most unfortunate loyalty to their British monarchs, CHARLES I. and his son JAMES II. The vic- torious party thought they had no security for their new possessions in Ireland, even under the protection of British power, so long as a vestige of liberty, of property, or of influence remained with the catholics, who formed four- fifths of the population; and hence they formed a system of laws against that sect, calculated not merely to subju- gate, but to brutalise them,-a system which a protestant legislator and eminent lawyer and statesman, shortly be- fore this period, in his endeavours to mitigate those laws, said,-They were a disgrace to the statute books of, arn enlightened nation; and so odious in their principles, that one might think they were passed in hell, and that demons were the legislators." And, in fact, if the catholics of Ireland did not become the most ignorant, stupid, and ferocious savages, it is by no means attributable to the spirit and letter of those statutes, so eminently calculated to render them such. The octennial bill, which was balm to the political wounds of the privileged sect, was a new source of bitter oppression to the degraded one. Every new election gave rise to new contests in every county; and every candidate sought to increase the numbers of his elective force. freehold, or profit rent, of forty shillings a year for thirty- one years, constituted every protestant an elector; and the result was, that every eighth year, the catholic, whose farm had been cultivated for thirty preceding years by labours of himself and his children, was turned out of possession, with his family, to beg, if they chose, in order