That revenge was attempted in Ulster at the death of Elizabeth. It ended in new disasters, new tortures, new confiscations. The counties of Tyrone, Derry, Donegal, Armagh, Fermanagh, and Cavan,—in all about three million acres,—were then seized by the Crown and distributed in lots to Scotch settlers. * * * * * In the year 1641, under the reign of Charles I., a few Irishmen having emigrated to the continent, and having been initiated to modern military tactics in the ranks of the French army, attempted to liberate their country. They provoked a rising, succeeded in holding in check during eight years all the British forces, and in 1649 compelled the King of England to grant them by formal treaty the conditions they themselves dictated. But a few days later the head of Charles fell on the scaffold, and Cromwell in person, escorted by his son, by Ireton and Ludlow, made it his business to come and annul the treaty of Kilkenny. “For Jesus!... No quarter!...” Such was the battle-cry he gave to his Roundheads. Drogheda, then Wexford were taken by storm; men, women, and children were exterminated; Galway fell in 1652. The populations, exhausted by a war and famine of ten years’ duration, surrendered themselves to his mercy, and laid down their arms. Cromwell had only now to reap the fruits of his victory by making Ireland pay for it. His first idea was to complete the extermination of the native race, in order to replace it by English colonists. But even his gloomy soul recoiled before the only means that at once and for ever could put an end to “the Irish gangrene.” He adopted a middle course, of much less radical efficacy. This middle course consisted in transporting, or, as they called it at the time _transplanting_ all the Irish into the region bounded by the Shannon, there to be penned up like men infested with the plague, while all the rest of the territory was allotted to English families. The enterprise was conducted with truly puritanical method and rigour. Thousands of Irish were shipped as slaves to the West Indies, thousands of others were imprisoned in Connaught, under pain of death for whoever should cross its limits. All the land, carefully parcelled out, was divided by lot between the soldiers of Cromwell, upon agreement that they should consider themselves bound to expend their pay for three years on the improvement of it. But those fields, to yield up their value, had to be cultivated, and the English labourer declined to become a voluntary exile in order to cultivate them. Little by little the native peasantry came back to their old homes with the tenacity peculiar to their class, they founded families and reconstituted the Irish nation under the ten or twelve thousand landlords imposed over them by fraud and violence. Forty years after Cromwell’s death, these landlords had even forgotten how to speak the English language. * * * * *