fanatic, and the feelings of Puritan conquerors towards a conquered Catholic people. "I have eaten with them," said one, "drunk with them, played with them, fought with them; but I never prayed with them." Their descendants became probably the very worst upper class with which a country was ever afflicted. The habits of the Irish gentry grew beyond measure brutal and reckless, and the coarseness of their debaucheries would have disgusted the crew of Comus'. Their drunkenness, their blasphemy, their ferocious duelling, left the squires of England far behind. If there was a grotesque side to their vices which mingles laughter with our reprobation, this did not render their influence less pestilent to the community of which the malice of destiny had made them the social chiefs. Fortunately their recklessness was sure, in the end, to work, to a certain extent, its own cure; and in the background of their swinish and uproarious drinking bouts, the Encumbered Estates Act rises to our view.

Over the Roman Catholic poor on their estates, these vermin of the kingdom," as Arthur Young, in his "Tour in Ireland," calls them, exercised a tyranny compared with which the arbitrary rule of the old chiefs over their clans was probably a parental authority used with beneficence, and justly repaid by gratitude and affection. The clansman was not, like the Roman Catholic peasant, "disarmed;" he did not "speak a language which was despised, and profess a religion which was abhorred." "A landlord in Ireland," says Arthur Young, in a passage which has been frequently

1 See especially the opening chapters of Barrington's Sketches.

quoted, "can scarcely invent an order which a servant, labourer or cottar, dares to refuse to execute. Nothing satisfies him but unlimited submission. Disrespect, or anything tending towards sauciness, he may punish with his cane or his horsewhip with the most perfect security. A poor man would have his bones broken if he offered to lift his hand in his own defence. Knocking down is spoken of in the country in a manner that makes an Englishman stare. Landlords of consequence have assured me that many of their cottars would think themselves honoured by having their wives and daughters sent for to the bed of their master, a mark of slavery which proves the oppression under which such people must live. Nay, I have heard anecdotes of the lives of people being made free with, without any apprehension of the justice of a jury. But let it not be imagined that this is common; formerly it happened every day, but law gains ground. It must strike the most careless traveller, to see whole strings of cars whipt into a ditch by a gentleman's footman, to make way for his carriage; if they are overturned or broken in pieces, no matter, it is taken in patience: were they to complain they would perhaps be horsewhipped. The execution of the laws lies very much in the hands of the justices of the peace, many of whom are drawn from the most illiberal class in the kingdom. If a poor man lodges his complaint against a gentleman, or any animal that chooses to call itself a gentleman, and the justice issues out a summons for his appearance, it is a fixed affront, and he will infallibly be called out. Where manners are in conspiracy against

law, to whom are the oppressed people to have recourse? It is a fact, that a poor man, having a contest with a gentleman, must-but I am talking nonsense; they know their situation too well to think of it; they can have no defence but by means of protection from one gentleman against another, who probably protects his vassal as he would the sheep he intends to eat."

The author of "An Inquiry into the Causes of Popular Discontents in Ireland m," states that “it has not been unusual in Ireland for great landed proprietors to have regular prisons in their houses, for the summary punishment of the lower orders." Not a century has passed since these ruffians and tyrants filled, in Ireland, the seat of justice. How many centuries of a widely different training have the English people gone through in order to acquire their boasted love of law!

Nothing is so rapacious as profusion; no landlord is so extortionate as one who is sensual and reckless. The Irish landlords, while they squandered their substance in the indulgence of insane pride as well as of gross licentiousness, were grinding their poor tenants to the dust. By all who had occasion to speak of the misery of the people, from Swift down to Lord Charlemont, the cry was raised against the extortions of the landlord and of his middlemen. The first and original causes of Whiteboyism are stated by Lord Charlemont to have been "exorbitant rents, low wages, want of employment in a country destitute of manufactures, where desolation and famine were the effects of fertility; where the rich gifts of a bountiful mother were de

m Quoted by Sir G. C. Lewis, "On Irish Disturbancy," p. 53.

structive to her children, and served only to tantalize them; where oxen supplied the place of men, and by leaving little room for cultivation, while they enriched their pampered owners, starved the miserable remnant of thinly scattered inhabitants: farms of enormous extent, let by their rapacious and indolent proprietors to monopolizing land-jobbers, by whom small portions of them were again let and relet to intermediate oppressors, and by them subdivided for five times their value, among the wretched starvers upon potatoes and water taxes yearly increasing, and tithes which the Catholic, without any possible benefit, unwillingly pays in addition to his priest-money: misery, oppression, and famine." The Tory Fitzgibbon, afterwards Lord Clare, would not have been disposed to exaggerate the miseries of a system of which he was a leading supporter: yet he said in a debate on tithes,-"The lower orders of the people in Munster are in a state of depression and abject poverty, sloth, dirt, and misery not to be equalled in any other part of the world. But this cannot be ascribed to the clergy,-far from it,-it is owing in the first place to their own indolence, and in the next to a set of men called middlemen; a set of gentry who, having no inheritance, no education, or other means of life, than by getting between the inheritor and the cultivator of the soil, grind the poor people to powder."

Lord Clare is not alone in placing the "indolence" of the people first among the causes of their distress. But had he himself been denied the benefit of education, shut out from all hope of improving his con

dition, and racked by a middleman, he would perhaps not have possessed the buoyancy and energy of mind, or have been capable of the vigorous exertions, which · raised him so high in the profession of the law.

Absenteeism, as well as middlemen, had become a cause of bitter complaints in the time of Swift, who includes in the general picture of misery "the old seats of the nobility and gentry all in ruins, and no new ones in their stead." It was natural that the gentry should avoid the sight of so much wretchedness; it was natural that their vain and frivolous natures should be drawn to the pleasures of Dublin or London; and they had neither sufficiently fine feelings nor a sufficient intellectual interest in social objects and improvements to keep them in the path of social duty. We have had occasion to observe in reference to the absenteeism of early Irish history that the money drawn away by absentees, though it is the common ground of complaint, is not the greatest evil of absenteeism. Wherever that money is spent it will be spent mainly in the employment of unproductive labour, and will consequently do little to increase the wealth of a country. The greatest evils of absenteeism are, first, that it withdraws from the community its upper class, who are the natural channels of civilizing influences to the classes below them; and secondly, that it cuts off all personal relations between the individual landlord and his tenant, closes up the compassion of the landlord, and exposes the tenant to a pressure as unfeeling and relentless as that of a hand of iron. It also has necessarily a general, though not an invariable tendency to prevent the improvement of the land.