Page:Petty 1851 The Down Survey.djvu/381

 The true appeal is to the quiet force of public opinion, as time moves on, and anger gradually subsides; and from that tribunal the award has long been favourable to the work of Dr. Petty. It stands to this day, with the accompanying books of distribution, the legal record of the title on which half the land of Ireland is held; and for the purpose to which it was and is applied, it remains sufficient. To the rapidity with which it was executed, the adventurers and soldiers are indebted for the Act of Satisfaction having been carried out. At the rate of progress of the former surveys, the distribution could not have been completed before the Restoration, when the lands would have been deemed indeed forfeited to the King, and their former proprietors deprived, but the distribution would probably have been very different. Some years afterwards, Sir William combined his maps, and engraved a county series, in the frontispiece to which, it may be observed, is the only portrait of him known to exist. This engraving is mentioned by Walpole, but the original picture is lost. For a general map of Ireland he felt the want, either of triangulation, or of latitudes and longitudes, to connect the counties and smaller divisions, and it was the end of the next century, before such a map, worthy to be so called, was constructed by Dr. Beaufort.

The more modern labours of the Ordnance Survey are too familiar to render any notice of them here necessary, if it were not wholly out of place to speak of them in detail, and the time is, perhaps, not come for doing so with advantage. They were very similar in many respects, as well of difficulties and obstructions, as in the modes of meeting them, to the work we have been considering, after a lapse of two hundred years; but they had their origin in peace, and for their object the improvement of the country, and the adjustment of its local burthens, instead of war, confiscation, and allotment.

The volume closes, indeed abruptly, at the period of greatest importance to Dr. Petty; but the facts and statements of both parties are set forth, and at the close of the "Reflections" so often quoted, he writes, "that although Sir Hierome and Mr. Worsley have calumniated me with most monstrous imputations, and have possessed many with a belief of them, yet no man to the present day ever taxed me with the least to my face; the which if any person shall think it worth his pains to do hereafter, I shall willingly give a meeting to hear him, or to prove any of the particulars to which I have alluded in this discourse. And I desire all now in power, especially such who, as I had, have the dispensing of benefits to multitudes, by way of antidote to themselves, to procure a fair hearing of Sir Hierome's articles, as also of my services and sufferings in Ireland, that I or my adversaries may be repaired or punished according to our respective demerits; I desire the same also from the curious in general, viz., that they would examine whether there must be fire, that is guilt, where there hath been so much smoak of calumny, for my enemies do not hate my work, but envy my wages. They labour to confirm the one, and yet to destroy my claim of the other. I suffer, not because I sin, but because I would not sin, and serve particular interests.

It is possible no conclusion more satisfactory might, in the heat of that time, have been