Excerpt from The Irish Abroad and at Home: At the Court and in the Camp; With Souvenirs of "the Brigade"; Reminiscences of an Emigrant Milesian The alleged motive for this atrocious augmentation of the sufferings of a people whose only crimes consisted in defend ing to the last extremity their independence, and in desperate fidelity to the faith of their ancestors, was, forsooth, to inure their acquiescence in British rule, and (as a means for insuring its permanence) conformity to the religion professed by the invaders. Whether this policy or proceeding be or be not susceptible of defence I shall not discuss, but no argument or sophistry can excuse or even palliate the inhuman and infamous abuse of the power delegated, for the purpose, to, or usurped by military chiefs, adventurers, and fanatics, and which rendered Ireland, for two hundred years at least, the most unhappy country on the face of the earth. During those two centuries oppression and resistance, revolt and repression, rebellion and defeat, with their accompanying horrors, succeeded to each other incessantly in that land for which the Almighty has done so much and man so little. The soul sickens at the catalogue of barbarities on the one hand, and of heroic endurance on the other, presented by the history of Ireland, throughout the period just alluded to that is, extending from the Reformation to the Declaration of Irish Independence, in 1782. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.