On what security, they asked, could any man invest his money or give a portion to his children, if he could not rely on positive laws and on the uninterrupted possession of many years?
The military adventurers among whom Cromwell portioned out the soil might perhaps be regarded as wrongdoers.

But how large a part of their estates had passed, by fair purchase, into other hands! How much money had proprietors borrowed on mortgage, on statute merchant, on statute staple! How many capitalists had, trusting to legislative acts and to royal promises, come over from England, and bought land in Ulster and Leinster, without the least misgiving as to the title! What a sum had those capitalists expended, during a quarter of a century, in building; draining, inclosing, planting! The terms of the compromise which Charles the Second had sanctioned might not be in all respects just.

But was one injustice to be redressed by committing another injustice more monstrous still?
And what effect was likely to be produced in England by the cry of thousands of innocent English families whom an English king had doomed to ruin?
The complaints of such a body of sufferers might delay, might prevent, the Restoration to which all loyal subjects were eagerly looking forward; and, even if his Majesty should, in spite of those complaints, be happily restored, he would to the end of his life feel the pernicious effects of the injustice which evil advisers were now urging him to commit.

He would find that, in trying to quiet one set of malecontents, he had created another.

As surely as he yielded to the clamour raised at Dublin for a repeal of the Act of Settlement, he would, from the day on which he returned to Westminster, be assailed by as loud and pertinacious a clamour for a repeal of that repeal.