the king had now an opportunity of repairing that error, and of relieving the natives from the exactions and tyranny of their former barbarous lords.  How far this change was a benefit to the honest freeholders and the labouring classes may be seen from the reports of Sir Toby Caulfield to the lord deputy, as to his dealings with those people.  He complains of his ill success in the prosecution of the wood-kerne.  He had done his best, and all had turned to nothing.  When the news of the plantation came, he had no hope at all, for the people then said it would be many of their cases to become wood-kerne themselves out of necessity, ’no other means being left for them to keep being in this world than to live as long as they could by scrambling.’  They hoped, however, that so much of the summer being spent before the commissioners came down, ’so great cruelty would not be showed as to remove them upon the edge of winter from their houses, and in the very season when they were employed in making their harvest.  They held discourse among themselves, that if this course had been taken with them in war time, it had had some colour of justice; but being pardoned, and their land given them, and they having lived under law ever since, and being ready to submit themselves to the mercy of the law, for any offence they can be charged withal, since their pardoning, they conclude it to be the greatest cruelty that was ever inflicted upon any people.’

It is no wonder that Sir Toby was obliged to add to his report this assurance:  ‘There is not a more discontented people in Christendom.’  It is difficult to conceive how any people in Christendom could be contented, treated as they were, according to this account, which the officer of the Government did not deny; for surely no people, in any Christian country, were ever the victims of such flagrant injustice, inflicted by a Government which promised to relieve them from the cruel exactions of their barbarous chiefs—­a Government, too, solemnly pledged to protect them in the unmolested enjoyment of their houses and lands.  How little this policy tended to strengthen the Government appears from a confession made about the same time by the lord deputy himself.  He wrote:  ’The hearts of the Irish are against us:  we have only a handful of men in entertainment so ill paid, that everyone is out of heart, and our resources so discredited, by borrowing and not repaying, that we cannot take up 1,000 l. in twenty days, if the safety of the kingdom depended upon it.  The Irish are hopeful of the return of the fugitives, or invasion from foreign parts.’