and yet great quantities of brass money remained in their hands, they began to consider how many of them, who had estates, had engaged them to protestants by judgments, statutes staple, and mortgages; and to take this likewise from them they procured a proclamation, dated 4 Feb. 1689, to make brass money current in all payments whatsoever.”  A proclamation of William III., dated July 10th, 1690, ordered that these crown pieces of James should pass as of equal value with one penny each. [T.S.]]

These halfpence, if they once pass, will soon be counterfeit, because it may be cheaply done, the stuff is so base.  The Dutch likewise will probably do the same thing, and send them over to us to pay for our goods.[22] And Mr. Wood will never be at rest but coin on:  So that in some years we shall have at least five times fourscore and ten thousand pounds of this lumber.  Now the current money of this kingdom is not reckoned to be above four hundred thousand pounds in all, and while there is a silver sixpence left these blood-suckers will never be quiet.

[Footnote 22:  The Dutch had previously counterfeited the debased coinage of Ireland and sent them over in payment for Irish manufactures. [T.  S.]]

When once the kingdom is reduced to such a condition, I will tell you what must be the end:  The gentlemen of estates will all turn off their tenants for want of payment, because as I told you before, the tenants are obliged by their leases to pay sterling which is lawful current money of England; then they will turn their own farmers, as too many of them do already, run all into sheep where they can, keeping only such other cattle as are necessary, then they will be their own merchants and send their wool and butter and hides and linen beyond sea for ready money and wine and spices and silks.  They will keep only a few miserable cottiers.[23] The farmers must rob or beg, or leave their country.  The shopkeepers in this and every other town, must break and starve:  For it is the landed man that maintains the merchant, and shopkeeper, and handicraftsman.

[Footnote 23:  “Unlike the peasant proprietor,” says Lecky, “and also unlike the mediaeval serf, the cottier had no permanent interest in the soil, and no security for his future position.  Unlike the English farmer, he was no capitalist, who selects land as one of the many forms of profitable investment that are open to him.  He was a man destitute of all knowledge and of all capital, who found the land the only thing that remained between himself and starvation.  Rents in the lower grades of tenancies were regulated by competition, but it was competition between a half-starving population, who had no other resources except the soil, and were therefore prepared to promise anything rather than be deprived of it.  The landlord did nothing for them.  They built their own mud hovels, planted their hedges, dug their ditches.  They were half naked, half starved, utterly destitute of all providence and of all education, liable at any time to be turned adrift from their holdings, ground to the dust by three great burdens—­rack-rents, paid not to the landlord but to the middleman; tithes, paid to the clergy—­often the absentee clergy—­of the church to which they did not belong; and dues, paid to their own priests” ("Hist, of Ireland,” vol. i., pp. 214-215, ed. 1892). [T.S.]]