Of all the wars waged by a half-civilized on a barbarous and despised race, these wars waged by the English on the Irish seem to have been about the most hideous. No quarter was given by the invader to man, woman, or child. The butchering of women and children is repeatedly and brutally avowed. Nothing can be more horrible than the cool satisfaction with which commanders report their massacres. "I was never," said Captain Woodhouse, "so weary with killing of men, for I protest to God for as fast as I could I did but hough and paunch them." "The number of their fighting men slain and drowned that day," says another commander, "were estimated and numbered to be fourteen hundred or fifteen hundred, besides boys, women, churls, and children, which could not be so few as many more and upwards." Over and over again massacres of people of both sexes and all ages are reported with similar coolness. Another ruffian seems to have put to death children who were held as hostages. Mountjoy especially used famine deliberately as his instrument of war, and with signal effect. After his work, multitudes lay dead in the ditches of towns and other waste places, with their mouths coloured green by eating docks and nettles. Children were seen eating their mother's corpse. Old women, we are told, lit fires in the woods and ate the children who came to warm themselves. Not only were horses killed and eaten, but cats and dogs, hawks and kites. The wolves, driven by hunger from the woods, killed the enfeebled people. The dead lay unburied or half-buried, the survivors not having strength to dig graves, and dogs ate the remains. It must be said that the native Irish not only retaliated these cruelties on the English whenever they could, but committed them on each other. Edward Butler, for example, invades Arra, the district of another clan, harries the country far and wide, breaks open the churches to which the frightened women had fled in the vain hope of sanctuary, and gives the region up for forty-eight hours to plunder and rape, sparing neither age nor condition. The lately gathered corn is destroyed, and famine stares the whole population in the face. The raid is presently repeated, the cattle are driven off, and a house full of women and children is given to the flames. In the English settlement of Munster, overrun by the native Irish, English children are taken from their nurses' breasts and dashed against walls; an Englishman's heart is plucked out in his wife's presence, and she is forced to lend an apron to wipe the murderer's fingers. Of the English fugitives who flocked into Youghal some had lost their tongues and noses. Irish tenants and servants that yesterday fed in the settlers' houses were conspicuous by their cruelty.