626 Has England misgoverned Ireland ? [J UNE, 
William Petty’s calculation, above alluded to, of its thin population, 
not exceeding three hundred thousand souls, scattered over a sur- 
face of eleven millions of acres of mountains, bogs, woods, and pas- 
tures, fully explains. How abominable is it in the governors of Upper 
Canada, that they have not yet civilized the Red Indians—that they are 
only driven further back into the woods and morasses as the English 
advance and establish new boundaries ! 
The Anglo-Canadian pale of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, 
is similar to the Anglo-Irish pale from the twelfth to the sixteenth 
inclusively. If we were as kind to these Red Indians as our ancestors 
were to the Irish—if we did not poison them with rum, but let them 
make a little usquebaugh to keep out the damp, our descendants would 
have the gratification of hearing Mohawk orators demanding seats in 
the imperial parliament as the imprescriptible birthright of freemen— 
whether idolaters or true believers—whether zealous maintainers of 
the integrity of the British empire, or lovers of Canadian indepen- 
dence. 
England found Ireland a fertile but uncultivated wild ; the habits 
of the people, and the fancied interests of their chieftains, were alike 
opposed to the introduction of civilization ;—the people knew nothing 
of its value, and their chiefs dreaded, in its adoption, the downfall of — 
their own barbarous sway. The adventurous English, however, gra-_ 
dually, as the population increased, extended their power ; and, while 
they yet scarcely held a moiety of the country, had built three thousand 
castles of solid masonry to preserve their conquest,—thus imitating the 
policy of William the Conqueror towards the Anglo-Saxons. But 
England did not confine herself to building castles, however necessary 
to protect her own settlers and the civilized Irish from the predatory 
attacks of the wild natives, issuing from their morasses. She planted 
English colonies, and built towns and cities, and introduced all the arts, 
then known by herself, into this late wilderness. All which improve- 
ments were made maugre the most inveterate hostility of the breeches- 
less princes of the soil, by the lords lieutenants and lords deputies of 
those incompetent and misgoverning dynasties, the Plantagenet and 
Tudor. It is the acme of ignorance and insolence to hear the milk-and- 
water statesmen of the present day—men, who have been blustered 
out of every thing that they have affected to hold sacred, by two or 
three brawling demagogues, and-who have had the ineffable assurance 
to say that they musi surrender, because it would be more dangerous 
to exercise the power of the English monarchy—I repeat it, it is the 
acme of ignorance and insolence to hear these modern statesmen echo 
the ravings of Irish demagogues against the illustrious men who admi- 
nistered the government of Ireland, from the twelfth to the seventeenth 
century. If they mus‘ prate of misgovernment, let them confine their 
vituperation within the period of their personal recollection. Let them 
denounce the surrender to the Irish Volunteer Association of 1780. 
Let them denounce the surrender of 1793 to French revolutionary 
terrors, which led to the surrender of 1829; but let them not presume 
to accuse the governments of the Edwards and the Henrys. Ireland 
owes every thing to England that partakes of civilization and pros- 
perity ; and if she have not as much of either as she is naturally capable 
of receiving, it has not been the fault of her fostering nurse, but of her 
own wayward and intractable disturbers. 
