Page:Studies in Irish History, 1649-1775 (1903).djvu/258

Derry and Limerick Derry was the scene of a great episode in the history of a colony; at Limerick a national tragedy had been enacted. The Jacobite administrators were but "a crowd." Their helplessness' prevented the evolution of an effective national government, and so Ireland, always a nation in posse, had not become a nation in being. Tyrconnell, who could remember the Confederation in session at Kilkenny, and was jealous of "the knot of Irish" who had the ear of Louis in Paris, worked persistently to check such a development as Ormond had been unable to prevent. Surely, as the oak immersed in her bogs, had Ireland absorbed her colonists. The Williamite wars produced a cleavage which arrested the process of fusion. But if, as Renan says, "suffering in common is a closer bond than joy" ("La souf france en commun unit plus que la joie"), the British Government of the time did something to unite the victors of 1689 and the vanquished of 1691. The Protestants and Catholics of Ireland were treated with sublimely impartial injustice; aggravated, on the one hand, by ungrateful indifference, and, on the other, by deliberate breach of faith. The Irish were robbed of the rights they had won; the soldiers of Derry were cheated of the pay they had earned; the moral of which seems to be that, except in small 246