Page:Books Condemned to be Burnt - James Anson Farrer.djvu/201

185 wrote an able but inconclusive answer to Molyneux' Case for Ireland, He last appears as Chief Justice in New York, where he became involved in debt and died.

In 1706 two works were condemned to the Mercat Cross: (1) An Account of the Burning of the Articles of Union at Dumfries; (2) Queries to the Presbyterian Noblemen, Barons, Burgesses, Ministers, and Commissioners in Scotland who are for the Scheme of an Incorporating Union with England.

Hutchinson's Commercial Restraints of Ireland, published in 1779, and reviewing the progress of English misgovernment, proved the correctness of Molyneux' prognostications nearly a century before.

"Can the history of any fruitful country on the globe," he asked (and the question may be asked still), "enjoying peace for fourscore years, and not visited by plague or pestilence, produce so many recorded instances of the poverty and wretchedness and of the reiterated want and misery of the lower orders of the people? There is no such example in ancient or modern history."

That a book of such sentiments should have been burnt, as easier so to deal with than to answer, would accord well enough