The following extract, from an impartial historian of the times, will give a brief outline of the parliamentary proceedings of that period: "His first measures after his arrival in the capital were highly impolitic, if not unjust. He promised, by a declaration, to pardon and protect such of the lower sort as should in a limited time surrender their arms; but he excepted the gentry, whom he resolved to abandon to all the rigors of war and conquest. He issued a commission for seizing all their estates and effects, though no court of judicature was open to proceed against them. The commissioners executed their power with the utmost rigor. They even ruined a country which they endeavored to appropriate to themselves. Public misery, persecution, and confusion prevailed everywhere. The king himself was either not sincere in his offers of mercy to the vulgar, or he possessed no authority to restrain the license of his army. His declaration was disregarded, his protections slighted. Revenge, wantonness, and avarice induced men to break through every form of decency and every tie of faith. Despair animated the Irish to a renewal of hostilities, as submission produced nothing but oppression and injustice."[38] Those measures were at the same time sagacious and cruel, and such as would have disunited any other people than those to whom they were now applied. They exempted the men of no property, but marked out all others for total ruin; and had there been no other principle at issue than the individual merits of William and James, it is hard to tell what their effect on the artisan and laboring classes might have been. But the clan system was not yet entirely eradicated from the minds of the people. Most of the private soldiery in the Irish army were men attached to their leaders by all the memories and ties which that system engenders, and the wrongs of those leaders were resented as their own individual wrongs. It is true that this system was dying out; but this war, which was waged for the maintenance of a common faith, served also to revive the ties of kindred and of clan, and it is probable, that had James succeeded in re-establishing his power in England, the feudal system of Ireland would have been revived in many, if not all, its forms. Therefore, in leaving the men of estate no choice between ruin and success, William utterly failed in his object of detaching the people from their leaders. On the contrary, they clung to them with greater fidelity than ever; and drawn back behind the Shannon, as their last line of defence, they submitted their cause to the arbitrament of the sword, and set the enemy at defiance.