tunately practically all of them, outside some few towns, would, if old enough to bear arms in 1642, have taken part in the rising, and so this concession was practically valueless.
Now appeared a famous pamphlet called The Great Case of Transplantation Discussed. The author, Vincent Gookin, was the son of an Englishman who had settled in Co. Cork in the time of James L, and was one of the six members sent by the Irish Protestants to Cromwell's Parliament—the first Union Parliament—in 1653.
In this pamphlet he declared that the new settlers had need of the Irish lower orders—poor labourers, simple creatures, whose sole design was to live and maintain their families, the manner of which was so low that their design was rather to be pitied than by any body feared or hindered. They alone could till the land, and so enable the new English landholders to live.
He gives rather unexpected testimony to Irish industry. "Few of the peasantry," says he, "but were skilful in husbandry, few of the women but were skilful in dressing hemp and flax and making woollen cloth. In every hundred men there were five or six masons and carpenters at least, and these more handy and ready in building ordinary houses, and much more skilful in supplying the defects of instruments and materials than English artificers."
This pamphlet raised a storm of opposition among the more zealous sectaries, who called for a thorough rooting out of the whole Irish population of the three provinces.
