“His Majesty’s humanity was greatly affected by hearing your Excellency’s opinion that the disturbances owe their rise to private oppression, and that the over-greediness and harshness of landlords may be a means of depriving the kingdom of a number of his Majesty’s most industrious and valuable subjects. The King does not doubt but that your Excellency will endeavour, by every means in your power, to convince persons of property of their infatuation in this respect, and instil into them principles of equity and moderation, which, it is to be feared, can only apply an efficient remedy to the evil.” In November, 1772, the Lord Lieutenant proclaimed a pardon to “the wicked and dangerous insurgents who in July, 1770, assembled themselves in arms in large numbers in the counties of Antrim, Down, Armagh, Derry, and Tyrone.” It was too late. The Belfast “News Letter” of the 16th April, 1773, computed that “within forty years past 400,000 people have left this kingdom to go and settle in America.” In the three years from 1771 to 1773 alone, 101 ships left Ulster ports, carrying over 30,000 emigrants. On the 15th June, 1773, John Wesley in his diary writes: “When I came to Belfast I learned the real cause of the insurrection in this neighbourhood. Lord Donegall, the proprietor of almost the whole country, came hither to give his tenants new leases. But when they came they found two merchants of the town had taken their farms over their heads; so that multitudes of them, with their wives and children, were turned out to the wide world. It is no wonder that, as their lives were now bitter to them, they should fly out as they did. It is rather a wonder that they did not go much further; and, if they had, who would have been most in fault? Those who were without home, without money, without food for themselves and families, or those who drove them to this extremity?” A dispatch to the “Irish Society” of the London Corporation in 1802 says of the Right Hon. Richard Jackson, a middleman of the London Clothworkers’ estate near Coleraine:— “It is commonly reported in the country that, having been obliged to raise the rents of his tenants very considerably, in consequence of the large fine he paid, it produced an almost total emigration among them to America, and that they formed a principal part of that undisciplined body which brought about the surrender of the British Army at Saratoga.” Unmoved by a riven empire, the Nero-like Marquises of Donegall, in unbroken succession, were quietly hatching out schemes to enforce the recognition of their Patent for the waters of Lough Neagh and the Bann. CHAPTER XXVI. THE PLANTERS’ QUARREL.