And this process of swindling, robbing, confiscation, spoliation and plunder went on until this estate, which commenced at two hundred and fifty-nine pounds in 1606, now yields the enormous revenue of sixty thousand pounds, or three hundred thousand dollars per annum! [Sidenote: THE YOUNG MAN BOYLE.] Which is to say, the laborers on this estate have been yearly robbed of their labor, and starved and frozen, that one family in England may live in wasteful luxury. This is all there is of it. About the same time that Essex got his grant, Sir Walter Raleigh got a grant of forty-two thousand acres (exclusive of bog and waste) from the plunder of the Earl of Desmond's estates. There lived in London at the time a young lawyer named Boyle, who was probably the worst man then living. He had been a horse thief, a forger, and murder had been charged to him. Raleigh was in prison and wanted money, and Boyle offered him one thousand five hundred pounds for his grant, which Raleigh accepted. Boyle paid him five hundred pounds on account, and promptly swindled him out of the balance. [Illustration: OLD BUT TOLERABLY CHEERFUL.] Boyle being serviceable to the court (such men always are), was created Earl of Cork, and got from James I. patents for his plunder. Then he proceeded to marry his children into noble English families, the Duke of Devonshire being one of the descendants. One small portion of the estate now yields His Grace an annual income of thirty thousand pounds, being only a part of the land for which his ancestor, the horse-thief, forger and murderer, paid five hundred pounds. His Grace, the Duke, is not content with the land. Under some clause in the patent given by the pedantic James to the criminal Boyle, he claims the right to the fisheries in the Blackwater, and the Irish Appellate Court, an English landlord's institution, as are all the courts, sustain the claim, and he levies tribute upon every fish drawn from the waters. If it were very certain that there is no hereafter, and if a man had no more heart than an exploded bomb shell, it would be a very good thing to be a duke, with a forger and horse-thief for an ancestor. The duke was very judicious in the selection of a father. The English landlord found after a while that sheep and cattle raising was more profitable than diversified farming, and with that calm, sublime disregard of the rights of the people which is characteristic of the ruling classes in England, eviction became fashionable. The policy pretty much all over Ireland was to clean out the population and consolidate a thousand small farms into one large one. Between the years 1841 and 1861, twenty years, there were destroyed in Ireland two hundred and seventy thousand cabins, representing a population of one million three hundred thousand, all driven to the workhouse, to exile or death.