The despair of the wretched found expression in violence. In 1761 a secret society called the Whiteboys was organised in Munster and parts of Leinster to resist, or exact vengeance for, the enclosure of commons, and unjust rents or tithe. The movement was agrarian, not religious, though the Whiteboys were catholics, nor political. It was formidable, for there was no Irish constabulary or militia. The Whiteboys would gather in obedience to some secret mandate, march by night in large and ordered companies, some to the land of one offender, others to that of another, and, making the darkness hideous with their white smocks, fall to houghing cattle, destroying fences, and spoiling pastures. Many cruel deeds were done, though the murders were few. Stern acts were passed against Whiteboyism; volunteers put themselves at the disposal of the magistrates, and the rising was at last crushed, not without cruelty and an unfair administration of the criminal law. The outbreak is a notable event in Irish history, for from that time until now secret societies which have attempted to gain their objects by lawless and bloody means have constantly existed in Ireland. In protestant Ulster the Oakboys, as they called themselves, rose in 1763 against an increase in the demands for tithe and the burdens laid upon them for making and repairing roads. Their rising was not accompanied by the cruelties which disgraced Whiteboyism, and was speedily pacified. Some years later the greediness of Lord Donegal, who for the sake of gain evicted over 6,000 protestant families and replaced them by new tenants, many of them catholics, caused a rising in Antrim and Down. Already numerous presbyterians of Ulster, men of Scottish and English descent, had been driven by the destruction of the woollen trade and the disabilities imposed by the test act to emigrate to America, and many of Donegal's evicted tenantry followed their example. Ireland lost men who should have defended British interests, and America gained some of her best soldiers in the revolutionary war. The feud between the protestants and catholics of Ulster arising out of Donegal's evictions bore bitter fruit in later troubles. [Sidenote: _THE IRISH PARLIAMENT._]