As for the fishery Patent, hurriedly rushed forth by casual Lords Justices to cheat the Londoners and the public, it is the only warrant of the Deputy’s descendants to control Lough Neagh and the Bann. By its “virtue” the right enjoyed by the people of a province from time immemorial to earn a livelihood as their fathers did was challenged, and an exasperating monopoly attempted to be established. Those who applaud the statecraft which resulted in the spoliation of the princes of Tyrone and Tirconnell may well ask themselves whether the breed which supplanted them is such a vast improvement. No catalogue heretofore drawn up of the sins of Irish chieftains brands them as cheats or forgers—though many other libels against them are extant from the pens of those by whom they were robbed. CHAPTER XXV. HOW TO LOSE AN EMPIRE. In the century which followed the reign of the Stuarts no record worth mention remains of the doings of Lord Donegall’S descendants. Gaelic annalists, who would have cherished local chronicles, had been driven out; and British civilisation had not overtaken or undertaken their work. That the Chichester frauds formed part of a long-continued system practised by the heads of the Executive appears from another exposure made, nearly a century later, in the English House of Commons. After the Revolution, Charles Montagu (subsequently Earl of Halifax, who was appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1694), was accused on the 16th February, 1698, of having in the previous year obtained for himself a grant, under the name of Thomas Railton, of forfeited estates in Ireland worth some £13,000. The lands included those of Lord Clancarty. Montagu, having a majority in the House, defiantly admitted the charge. In 1701, however, he was impeached, on this and other grounds. He again did not deny the facts, and pleaded the authority of King William III. Ultimately, the impeachment was abandoned as impracticable, but Montagu was struck off the Privy Council. Many of the Elizabethan and Stuart grants reveal a purpose, not only to seize the land of the natives, but to reduce them into slavery. Elizabeth’s charter to the Smiths in 1571 gave, with the territory to be conquered, “native men and women” as chattels. Chichester declared in 1602 that the Irish “should be made perpetual slaves to her Majesty”; and he wished to send O’Cahan to the Virginias instead of to the Tower. In 1605 Hamilton was awarded by James I. “native men and women villeins and their followers.” In 1613 the charter to the Londoners enabled them to take “estrayed bondmen and bondwomen and villeins and their followers.” A Patent of Charles I. presented Hamilton, after he became Lord Claneboy, with “natives and villeins with their sequels.” Cromwell’s shipments of Irish youth as slaves to the Barbadoes was merely a development of this policy.