Page:Studies in Irish History, 1649-1775 (1903).djvu/314

After Limerick much of the best blood and the most energetic spirits of the nation went into voluntary exile. Those native Irish or Anglo-Irish Catholics who remained in the country could hardly feel much loyalty towards the English Crown. To them, smarting with indignation at the loss of their lands, embittered by years of savage warfare, the English Crown could seem nothing more than a shadowy supporter of the English colonists who now appeared to have the unhappy country at their mercy. There were, in fact, two nations in Ireland, one with all the wealth and political power, the other poor and humiliated, without rights or privileges or freedom of conscience.

But rapidly ensuing events showed that the Irish Protestants were to gain little from their position of seeming authority, and it was not long before they, as well as the Catholics, were to feel the heavy hand of England crushing out their prosperity. With her accustomed capacity for recuperation, Ireland began, industrially speaking, to recover extremely rapidly from the effects of the revolutionary war. The years 1696, 1697, and 1698, were comparatively prosperous, and this new prosperity was partly due to the growth of an Irish woollen manufacture. English weavers had lately emigrated to Ireland, tempted 302