Sixty years after the event, when Burke revisited Ireland, some important changes had taken place.  The English settlers of the beginning of the century had formed an Irish interest.  They had become Anglo-Irish, just as the colonists still further west had formed a colonial interest and become Anglo-American.  The same conduct on the part of the mother country promoted the growth of these hostile interests in both cases.  The commercial policy pursued by England towards America was identical with that pursued towards Ireland.  The industry of the Anglo-Irish traders was restricted, their commerce and even their production fettered, their prosperity checked, for the benefit of the merchants of Manchester and Bristol. Crescit Roma Albae ruinis.  “The bulk of the people,” said Stone, the Primate, “are not regularly either lodged, clothed, or fed; and those things which in England are called necessaries of life, are to us only accidents, and we can, and in many places do, subsist without them.”  On the other hand, the peasantry had gradually taken heart to resent their spoliation and attempted extirpation, and in 1761 their misery under the exactions of landlords and a church which tried to spread Christianity by the brotherly agency of the tithe-proctor, gave birth to Whiteboyism—­a terrible spectre, which, under various names and with various modifications, has ridden Ireland down to our own time.

Burke saw the Protestant traders of the dependency the victims of the colonial and commercial system; the Catholic landowners legally dispossessed by the operation of the penal laws; the Catholic peasantry deeply penetrated with an insurgent and vindictive spirit; and the Imperial Government standing very much aloof, and leaving the country to the tender mercies of the Undertakers and some Protestant churchmen.  The Anglo-Irish were bitterly discontented with the mother country; and the Catholic native Irish were regarded by their Protestant oppressors with exactly that combination of intense contempt and loathing, and intense rage and terror, which their American counterpart would have divided between the Negro and the Red Indian.  To the Anglo-Irish the native peasant was as odious as the first, and as terrible as the second.  Even at the close of the century Burke could declare that the various descriptions of the people were kept as much apart as if they were not only separate nations, but separate species.  There were thousands, he says, who had never talked to a Roman Catholic in their whole lives, unless they happened to talk to a gardener’s workman or some other labourer of the second or third order; while a little time before this they were so averse to have them near their persons, that they would not employ even those who could never find their way beyond the stables.  Chesterfield, a thoroughly impartial and just observer, said in 1764 that the poor people in Ireland were used worse than negroes by their masters and the middlemen.  We should never forget that