Dr. Beaufort, in his Ecclesiastical Map, gives our whole population in 1789 as 4,088,226.  Sir Henry Parnell says the Catholics were, at this time, at least three-fourths of the population.[53] And this agrees with the estimate which the Catholics themselves made of their numbers at the period; for, in a long and remarkable petition, presented to the House of Commons in January, 1792, they say:  “Behold us then before you, three millions of the people of Ireland.”  These three millions became, by the Bill of ’93, entitled to the elective franchise; or, as the Bill itself more correctly expressed it, “such parts of all existing oaths,” as put it out of their power to exercise the elective franchise, were repealed.  The Catholics were not slow in availing themselves of this important privilege, which they had not enjoyed since the first year of George the Second’s reign—­a period of sixty-six years.[54] They soon began to influence the elections in at least three out of the four provinces; but they influenced them only through their landlords, not daring, for a full generation after, to give independent votes.  A landlord had political influence in proportion to the number of voters he brought, or rather drove, to the poll.  To secure and extend this influence, the manufacture of forty-shilling freeholders went on rapidly, and to an enormous extent.  The Catholics were poor, numerous, subservient, and doubtless grateful for recent concessions; so bits of land, merely sufficient to qualify them for voting, were freely leased to them, which they as freely accepted.[55] On these they built cabins, relying on the potato for food, and on a little patch of oats or wheat, to pay their rent and taxes.  By the influence of O’Connell and the Catholic Association, the forty-shilling freeholders broke away from landlord influence in the great General Election of 1826, and supported the candidates who promised to vote for Catholic Emancipation, in spite of every threat.  From that day their doom was sealed; the landlords began to call loudly for their disfranchisement, and accordingly they were disfranchised by the Relief Bill of 1829, but of course they still retained their little holdings.  Immediately the landlords began to utter bitter complaints of surplus population; they began to ventilate their grievances through the English and Irish press, saying that their land was overrun by cottiers and squatters—­the main cause of all this being kept in the background, namely, the immense and continuous increase of forty-shilling freeholders, by themselves, and for their own purposes.  But the moment those poor men presumed to vote according to the letter and the spirit of the Constitution, they were sacrificed to landlord indignation; they were declared to be an incumbrance on the soil that ought to be removed.  Landlords began to act upon this view:  they began to evict, to exterminate, to consolidate; and in this fearful work the awful Famine of ’47 became a powerful, and I fear in many cases even a welcome, auxiliary to the Crowbar Brigade.[56]