The Normans, as we saw, paid themselves for conquering the Saxons and Angles by assuming a perpetual right to tax their produce; a right still in full force, and forming the very foundation of the ruling class in England.  The land tenure thus created was, under the Tudors and the first Stuarts, bodily transferred to Ireland.  In Ireland the land had ever been owned by the people, each tribe, as representing a single family, holding a certain area by communal tenure, and electing a chief to protect its territory from aggression.  For this elective chieftainship the English law-courts substituted something wholly different:  a tenure modeled on the feudal servitude of England.  This new principle made the land of the country the property not of the whole people but of a limited and privileged class:  the favorites of the ruling power—­“hungry parasites” as the Congress of 1775 called them.  This “landed” class continued to hold absolute sway until quite recently, and it was this class which succumbed to bribery in 1800, and passed the Act of Legislative Union with England.  The clergy of the Established church were little more than the private chaplains of the “landed” class, the two alien bodies supporting each other.

Folly, however, was the child of injustice; for so shortsighted were these hungry parasites that they developed a system of land-laws so bad as to cause universal poverty, and bring a reaction which is steadily sweeping the “landed” class of Ireland to extinction and oblivion.  The fundamental principle of these bad land-laws was this:  the tenant was compelled to renew his lease from year to year; and whenever, during the year, he had in any way improved the land in his possession,—­by draining marshes, by reclaiming waste areas, by adding farm-buildings, the “owner” of the land could demand an enhanced rent, as the condition of renewing the lease.  The tenant had to submit to a continually ascending scale of extortion, sanctioned by law and exacted by armed force; or, as an alternative, he had to give up the fruit of his industry without compensation and without redress.

Anything more certain to destroy energy, to cut at the roots of thrift, to undermine all the best qualities of manhood, it would be impossible to imagine.  The slave on the plantation could in time purchase his freedom.  The tiller of the soil in Ireland found, on the contrary, that the greater his industry, the greater was the sum he had to pay for the right to exercise it.  We saw that there never was any pretence of free contract in the feudal land-tenure of England; that there never was any pretence of an honest bargain between farmer and landlord, for their mutual benefit.  The tenant paid the landlord for services rendered, not to him, but to his Norman conqueror.  So it was, in an even greater degree, in Ireland.  There was no pretence at all that tenant and landlord entered into a free contract for their mutual benefit.  Nor did either law, custom, religion or opinion require the landlord to make any return to his tenants for the share of the fruit of their toil he annually carried away.