More Humanising Logic

In the wake of the 'humanist' argument exampled in the last piece about how those whose heads were cut off didn't actually suffer for the process and so this decapitating was not a practice against which anyone could seriously argue, another almost blackly comic example follows, which edifying use of the remarkable tool of Reason happily demonstrated the intrinsic superiority of the wielders of this wondrous intellectual tool, set against which civilising intelligence the savage foe was nakedly shown in all his barbaric ingloriousness.

Nicholas Canny writes of what was "considered as essential justification for the English purpose to fashion a completely new order through a process of plantation in preference to reforming the existing society in Munster": this justifying aid being the Roman law of res nullius, which maintained that all 'empty things', particularly unoccupied or under-utilised land, remained the common property of humanity until brought into efficient use by an enterprising people who might then become its owners.
But Ireland was well populated so what use was this here?

Francis Bacon had a preference for a "Plantation in a pure soil; that is where People are not displanted to the end to Plant others. For else it is rather an Extirpation than a Plantation," and Queen Elizabeth was not keen on making enemies of dispossessed subjects whose loyalty she should have been encouraging. Also to deserve her place at the head of the state, her conduct should uphold rather than contravene the principles of correct government.

According to Edmund Spenser, describing the province of Munster in the 1580s after the wars and attendant famines visited on the lands by its civilising colonisers: "A most populous and plentiful country was suddenly left void of man and beast", and Sir Valentine Browns wrote that "not one of thirty persons" had survived the wars and "those for the most part starvelings."

And so since, according to the colonisers themselves, a genocide had been so wholly effected, then the queen could overcome with ease of mind any scruples regarding the dispossessing of the native Munster population and repeopling of the land with English people, since there was virtually noone left alive to dispossess.

And so the happy logic of res nullius ushered in with ennobling justification the more zealous colonisation ahead, a logic "altogether more compelling when supplemented by evidence that the lands lay vacant, thus overcoming any reasonable objections that might have been raised." (Canny) Reason's dictates were satisfied. All was in order. Onwards.