The English primate of Ireland ordained and placed in an Irish living a Hampshire deer-stealer, who had only saved himself from the gallows by turning informer against his comrades. Archbishop King wrote to Addison, "You make nothing in England of ordering us to provide for such and such a man L200 per annum, and, when he has it, by favor of the government, he thinks he may be excused attendance; but you do not consider that such a disposition takes up, perhaps, a tenth part of the diocese, and turns off the cure of ten parishes to one curate." From the very highest appointment to the lowest, in secular and sacred things, all departments of administration in Ireland were given over as a prey to rapacious jobbers. Charles Lucas, M.P. for Dublin, wrote in 1761 to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, "Your excellency will often find the most infamous of men, the very outcasts of Britain, put into the highest employments or loaded with exorbitant pensions; while all that ministered and gave sanction to the most shameful and destructive measures of such viceroys never failed of an ample share in the spoils of a plundered people." Arthur Young, in 1779, estimated the rents of absentee landlords alone at L732,000; and Hutchinson, in the same year, stated that the sums remitted from Ireland to Great Britain for rents, interest of money, pensions, salaries, and profit of offices amounted, on the lowest computation (from 1668 to 1773), to L1,110,000 yearly. If, in treating of Newfoundland, I have made many extracts from Mr. Lecky's references to Ireland, it is in order that I may show Mr. Spearman the danger of laying too much stress on the French claims as the cause of the present distress in England's oldest colony. France had no claims in Ireland, and yet the conduct of the British government and the British tradesman to that unfortunate island is one of the blackest infamies of the eighteenth century. Mr. Lecky says in Chapter V., page 11, of his history: "To a sagacious observer of colonial politics two facts were becoming evident. The one was that the deliberate and malignant selfishness of English commercial legislation was digging a chasm between the mother country and the colonies which must inevitably, when the latter had become sufficiently strong, lead to separation. The other was that the presence of the French in Canada was an essential condition of the maintenance of the British empire in America." If Mr. Lecky had studied Newfoundland's history, he might have added a third fact; namely, that the French claims in Newfoundland have been for the Jingoes of the last half-century a convenient means of excuse for shirking their own responsibility to the unfortunate island, and for covering up the malignant selfishness of those tradesmen in Canada and England to whose private interests the island has been sacrificed by the government.