Note 553 — Chapter XVIII · ON THE CONSTITUTION OF IRELAND

The statements of lands forfeited and restored, under the execution of the act of settlement, are not the same in all writers. Sir William Petty estimates the superficies of Ireland at 10,500,000 Irish acres (being to the English measure nearly as eight to thirteen), whereof 7,500,000 are of good land, the rest being moor, bog, and lake. In 1641, the estates of the protestant owners and of the church were about one-third of these cultivable lands, those of catholics two-thirds. The whole of the latter were seized or sequestered by Cromwell and the parliament. After summing up the allotments made by the commissioners under the act of settlement, he concludes that, in 1672, the English, protestants, and church have 5,140,000 acres, and the papists nearly half as much. Political Anatomy of Ireland, C. 1. In Lord Orrery's Letters, i. 187 et post, is a statement, which seems not altogether to tally with Sir William Petty's; nor is that of the latter clear and consistent in all its computations. Lawrence, author of "The Interest of Ireland Stated," a treatise published in 1682, says, "Of 10,868,949 acres, returned by the last survey of Ireland, the Irish papists are possessed but of 2,041,108 acres, which is but a small matter above the fifth part of the whole."—Part ii. p. 48. But, as it is evidently below one-fifth, there must be some mistake. I suspect that in one of these sums he reckoned the whole extent, and in the other only cultivable lands. Lord Clare, in his celebrated speech on the Union, greatly over-rates the confiscations.

Petty calculates that above 500,000 of the Irish "perished and were wasted by the sword, plague, famine, hardship, and banishment, between the 23rd day of October 1641, and the same day 1652;" and conceives the population of the island in 1641 to have been nearly 1,500,000, including protestants. But his conjectures are prodigiously vague.