Page:Studies in Irish History, 1649-1775 (1903).djvu/332

After Limerick Protestants, and had they been allowed, might have done much to increase the material wealth of the country, and would have been a real support to the English Government. But the shortsighted policy of England shut them out from all civil and municipal offices, hampered their trade and industry, and refused to allow them freedom of worship. It was one thing to refuse to tolerate Dissent in England; it was quite another to refuse to do so in Ireland, where any splitting of the Protestant body was a source of serious political danger to England. By her refusal to tolerate any but one form of Protestantism, England drove the most energetic and enterprising of the Protestants into exile, she prevented the growth of a large and wealthy Protestant population, and she made the Presbyterians hate English rule. It was these ScotchIrish from Ulster who settled principally in the New England States, as well as in the southern colonies, who, later on, proved to be the very life and soul of the American struggle for liberty.

Still, great as were the injuries inflicted on the Irish Dissenters, they were as nothing compared to the sufferings endured by the Irish Catholics. The consequence was that from 1691 all through the first half of the eighteenth century, Catholic Ireland underwent a steady process of depletion. 320