At the same time that a wide and impassable line was drawn by the law between the two religions in Ireland, and the one persuasion was made a privileged, the other an inferior class, the whole of Ireland was treated as a province or colony, whose interest was to be sacrificed to those of the mother-country. Hence arose the restrictions on Irish commerce,—on the exportation of corn, cattle, and woollen goods,—avowedly for the benefit of England. A system of government administered in this spirit, and in a country where a people were already in a state of great rudeness and disorder, necessarily led to the degradation and demoralizing of the bulk of the population."
Local Disturbances of Ireland and the Church Questions,
by Sir G. C. Lewis, p. 47.
