History of the civil wars of Ireland Author:William Cooke Taylor Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER IV. The Cromwdlian. Settlement. The Irish war was now at an end; the greater part of the nobility and gentry, with the flower of the army, had soug... more »ht an asylum in foreign lands ; the estates of the confederates were deserted rather than forfeited ; and the English commonwealth prepared to put into execution a system of confiscation and plantation, more extensive and complete than any that Elizabeth, James, or Charles, had ventured even to contemplate. The ordinance for the settling of Ireland amply proves, that the English Parliament, notwithstanding its boasted attachment to liberty and justice, was by no means scrupulous in outraging those who were subjected to their power; so true is the aphorism, that large bodies are insensible of shame, and that a collection of men will consent to acts of iniquity, from which each, individually, would have shrunk with horror. The first clause of this ordinance is very remarkable; it declares, that it was not the intention of the English Parliament to extirpate the Irish nation ! Such a proposal had The people of England at this period, however, deemed that the soil of Ireland was absolutely their own property, with which they could do as they pleased, and looked upon the nabeen actually made by some of the wilder fanatics, who deemed themselves commissioned by heaven to execute the same vengeance on the idolatrous Papists that the Jews did on the inhabitants of Canaan. In every age and country, since the introduction of Christianity, we find enthusiasts invariably preferring the horrors of the Old Testament to the mercies of the New, and proclaiming themselves the servants of a God of vengeance, and not of a God of love. The advocates of such monstrous doctrines, the votaries of the Mosaic, rather than the Christian dispen...« less