Page:Life of Sir William Petty 1623 – 1687.djvu/55

 advantage and profit to themselves. Unmerciful passion blinded every religious party, with a few trifling exceptions and with only differences in degree, to the teachings of the gospel of justice and mercy, of which each professed to be on earth the special representative. But even in the seventeenth century, and amid the tumult of conflicting religious animosities, the voice of human nature could occasionally make itself heard; and the views of Gookin and Petty, neither of whose characters were exactly cast in a sentimental mould, found an echo in England.

'The cause of the war,' Petty said, 'was a desire of the Romists to recover the Church revenue, worth about 1,100,000l. per annum, and of the common Irish to get all the Englishmen's estates, and of the ten or twelve grandees of Ireland to get the Empire of the whole.' These grandees had led the Irish people into the troubles out of which they themselves emerged defeated and ruined. But admitting this, and admitting also, as Vincent Gookin and Petty both did, that in consequence 'it was for the security of the English and the English interest to divide the Irish one from the other, especially the commonalty from the chiefs,' they argued that it was not, therefore, necessary to drive out also all the proprietors who could not prove 'constant good affection.' Further, the peculiar constitution of Irish society and of the land system must, they saw, cause an enormous mass of their dependents, their tenants, their retainers and labourers, to be driven out with them, notwithstanding the exemptions of the Act; and it was therefore not true to say that only proprietors and men in arms were being ordered to go.

The authors of the rebellion and massacres, those who had led the people to commit the atrocities which had so deeply stirred the public conscience, 'the bloody persons,' were, Gookin and Petty argued, 'all dead by sword, famine, pestilence, and the hand of civil justice; or remain still liable to it; or are fled beyond sea from it; the priests and soldiers (the kindlers of the war in the beginning and fomenters of it since) are, for the first, universally departed the land, and for