_Irish forfeitures resumed._--There is, if not mere apology for the conduct of the Commons, yet more to censure on the king's side, in another scene of humiliation which he passed through, in the business of the Irish forfeitures. These confiscations of the property of those who had fought on the side of James, though, in a legal sense, at the Crown's disposal, ought undoubtedly to have been applied to the public service. It was the intention of parliament that two-thirds at least of these estates should be sold for that purpose; and William had, in answer to an address (Jan. 1690) promised to make no grant of them till the matter should be considered in the ensuing session. Several bills were brought in to carry the original resolutions into effect, but, probably through the influence of government, they always fell to the ground in one or other house of parliament. Meanwhile the king granted away the whole of these forfeitures, about a million of acres, with a culpable profuseness, to the enriching of his personal favourites, such as the Earl of Portland and the Countess of Orkney.[210] Yet as this had been done in the exercise of a lawful prerogative, it is not easy to justify the act of resumption passed in 1699. The precedents for resumption of grants were obsolete, and from bad times. It was agreed on all hands that the royal domain is not inalienable; if this were a mischief, as could not perhaps be doubted, it was one that the legislature had permitted with open eyes till there was nothing left to be alienated. Acts therefore of this kind shake the general stability of possession, and destroy that confidence in which the practical sense of freedom consists, that the absolute power of the legislature, which in strictness is as arbitrary in England as in Persia, will be exercised in consistency with justice and lenity. They are also accompanied for the most part, as appears to have been the case in this instance of the Irish forfeitures, with partiality and misrepresentation as well as violence, and seldom fail to excite an odium far more than commensurate to the transient popularity which attends them at the outset.[211]