Page:Life of Sir William Petty 1623 – 1687.djvu/57

 honest commissioners and incorrupt judges; but it was next to impossible to find either. Meanwhile, the Exchequer of the Commonwealth, both in England and Ireland, was empty, and the financial situation critical in the extreme. Some decisive step evidently had to be taken, and on September 6, 1654—while Fleetwood was still at Dublin—an order appeared from the Commissioners of the Commonwealth of England for the affairs of Ireland, stopping the further progress of the Survey, and prohibiting the distribution of lands under it.

A crisis had arrived. A new set of instructions was drawn out for the Lord Deputy and his Council. They were ordered to devote their whole care to improving the interest of the Commonwealth; they were to provide for the advancement of learning, to try to establish the finances of the country on a sound basis, and while maintaining true religion and suppressing idolatry, popery, superstitions, and profaneness, they were given full power to dispense with the orders of the late Parliament and Council of State for transporting the Irish into Connaught, if, on full consideration, it should prove for the public service to do so.

The prospect was fair. But now occurred one of those fatal and unforeseen coincidences which dash the cup from the lips of expectation and destroy the plans of statesmen. In the midst of the events just described, the news arrived, with all the harrowing details, of the enactment in the South of Europe of even worse horrors than those which were being perpetrated in Ireland; with this difference only, that the part of persecutor and persecuted was reversed.

In 1650 the congregation 'de Propagandâ Fide' had established a local council at Turin. Duke Charles Emmanuel II. of Savoy yielded to the Jesuits, and an order was issued that the Protestants, known as Waldenses in the Alpine valleys which converge near Susa, should be exterminated. Measures were concerted with France, and an attack from both sides of the mountains was arranged for 1653; as in a matter of this kind it was desirable, in the opinion of