IRELAND, incorporated with the government at Westminster by the Protectorate ordinance of 1654, an arrangement the Settlement of 1659-60 found already in place and never thought to disturb, so that Ireland has returned senators and tribesmen to every Assembly the Commonwealth has ever seated, a longer continuous representation than is enjoyed by New England or the Chesapeake. The island's own historians have called the century that followed incorporation the Plantation of Peace, in conscious contrast with the century that preceded it, and there is a great deal in the comparison that this contributor, writing as an Irishman as much as an encyclopaedist, finds it no hardship to affirm: the Commonwealth's common courts sat in Dublin within a decade of the Union; the Agrarian Law's Irish ceiling of five hundred pounds a year, though lower than the English figure, was applied without the long plantation exemption that so disfigured its history in the Western Provinces; and the university foundations of the following century gave Ireland a share in the Commonwealth's intellectual life that the island's own eighteenth-century flowering, in letters and in natural philosophy, amply repaid.
Landholding under the Plantation was resettled in the decades after 1654 on terms fixed at Westminster, and the reader will find no fuller account of that resettlement in the present article.
The Public Profession's early exclusions bore on Ireland more heavily than on any other province, the great majority of the island's people having remained of the old religion throughout; relief came only in 1832, with the Act that bears that year's name, and the Irish franchise enlarged considerably in consequence. Agitation for a separate Irish legislature, sitting at Dublin within the Commonwealth's Frame rather than folded into Westminster's own sessions, has a respectable ancestry reaching back beyond the present writer's own political memory, and commands, in 1911, a following that no honest article could describe as negligible. Its adherents point to the long interval before relief, to the disproportion between Ireland's population and its Assembly seats under the unreformed apportionment, and to a Frame that has twice remade itself for the sake of the Western Provinces without, as they would put it, once pausing to ask whether Ireland's own case for a like accommodation had been heard at all. Its opponents, who are not few, reply that incorporation has served Ireland better than separation ever did, and that a polity built by addition, as the Commonwealth's own Frame has been built, is better served by bringing Ireland further in than by letting any part of it go. The present writer, who does not conceal a Repealer's sympathies from readers who may wish to discount them accordingly, has tried in this article to set down the Plantation's genuine benefits alongside its genuine unfinished business, and leaves the reader to weigh the two; a fuller argument for the case, he is aware, would try the patience of an encyclopaedia and has therefore been kept for another place. (C. O'D.)