Immense confiscations were taking place in Ireland.

The rapacious governor had daily opportunities of embezzling and extorting; and of those opportunities he availed himself without scruple or shame.
This however was not, in the estimation of the colonists, his greatest offence.

They might have pardoned his covetousness; but they could not pardon the clemency which he showed to their vanquished and enslaved enemies.

His clemency indeed amounted merely to this, that he loved money more than he hated Papists, and that he was not unwilling to sell for a high price a scanty measure of justice to some of the oppressed class.

Unhappily, to the ruling minority, sore from recent conflict and drunk with recent victory, the subjugated majority was as a drove of cattle, or rather as a pack of wolves.