We must get rid of the tinsel which has been scattered by poetry over the past ages of Ireland. History shows, under the embroidered cloak, only squalidness. Common sense tells us what _must_ be the condition of a people without arts, commerce, or agriculture; perpetually nurturing a savage prejudice, and exhibiting it in the shape of a savage revenge; ground to the dust by poverty, yet abhorring exertion; suffering under hourly tyranny, yet incapable of enjoying the freedom offered to them; and looking on the vigorous and growing prosperity of the English colonist, with only the feeling of malice, and the determination to ruin him. The insurrection of 1641, in which probably 50,000 Protestant lives were sacrificed, was only one of the broader scenes of a havoc which every age was exemplifying on a more obscure, but not less ferocious scale. The evidence of this indolent misery is given in the narrowness of the population, which, at the beginning of the last century, scarcely reckoned a million of souls: and this, too, in a country of remarkable fertility, free from all habitual disease, with a temperate climate, and a breadth of territory containing at this hour eight millions, and capable of supporting eight millions more. The existing condition of Ireland, even with all the difficulties of its own creation, is opulence, peace, and security, compared with its wretchedness at the period of the English revolution. The measure of giving votes for members of parliament to the Popish peasantry was the immediate offspring of faction, and, like all its offspring, exhibited the fallacy of faction. It failed in every form. It had been urged, as a means of raising the character of the peasantry--it instantly made perfidy a _profession_. It had been urged, as giving the landlord a stronger interest in the comforts and conciliation of his tenantry--it instantly produced the splitting of farms for the multiplication of votes, and, consequently, all the hopeless poverty of struggling to live on patches of tillage inadequate for the decent support of life. It had been urged, as a natural means of attaching the peasantry to the constitution--it instantly exhibited its effects in increased disorder, in nightly drillings and daylight outbreaks; in the assassination of landlords and clergy, and in those more daring designs which grow out of pernicious ignorance, desperate poverty, and irreconcilable superstition. The populace--beginning to believe that concession had been the result of fear; that to receive they had only to terrify; and that they had discovered the secret of power in the pusillanimity of parliament--answered the gift of privilege by the pike; and the "forty-shilling freeholder" exhibited his new sense of right in the insurrection of 1798--an insurrection which the writer of these volumes--from his intelligence and opportunities a competent authority--calculates to have cost 30,000 lives, and not less than three millions sterling!