proportion these 2000 or so of Catholic landowners who were assigned lands west of the Shannon bore to the total number of Catholic landowners in Ireland in 1641, and what was the total acreage possessed by the latter at that date.
Sir W. Petty has given certain figures which have been largely adopted by subsequent writers. According to him, the area of Ireland is ten million Irish acres. There is an underestimate here, due to an error that runs through all Petty's survey. It is, for us, in this connection a fortunate one, since the true area of Ireland, being a little over twenty million English acres, we have only to multiply Petty's figures by two to get fairly accurate results in English acres.
Multiplying in this way, we find that Petty estimates one-fourth of the island, i.e., five million acres, as unprofitable. Of the remaining profitable area, over two-thirds, i.e., ten million four hundred thousand English acres were held by Catholics, and four million six hundred thousand English acres by Protestants in 1641.[1] He then gives figures showing how the ten million profitable acres held by Catholics in 1641 were dealt with under the Acts of Settlement and Explanation, and arrives at the conclusion that the net result of the proceedings under the Commonwealth and at the Restoration was the transfer of over five and a half million English acres of profitable land from Catholic to Protestant hands, leaving over four and a half millions still in possession of Catholics.[2]
- ↑ Political Anatomy.
- ↑ Several difficulties arising out of Petty's figures are given in the footnotes of Hull's edition of the Economic Writings of Sir W. Petty.
