in the transactions with the English Government during the eighteenth century, the people concerned were not the Irish, but the Anglo-Irish, the colonists of 1691.  They were an aristocracy, as Adam Smith said of them, not founded in the natural and respectable distinctions of birth and fortune, but in the most odious of all distinctions, those of religious and political prejudices—­distinctions which, more than any other, animate both the insolence of the oppressors and the hatred and indignation of the oppressed.

The directions in which Irish improvement would move were clear from the middle of the century to men with much less foresight than Burke had.  The removal of all commercial restrictions, either by Independence or Union, on the one hand, and the gradual emancipation of the Catholics, on the other, were the two processes to which every consideration of good government manifestly pointed.  The first proved a much shorter and simpler process than the second.  To the first the only obstacle was the blindness and selfishness of the English merchants.  The second had to overcome the virulent opposition of the tyrannical Protestant faction in Ireland, and the disgraceful but deep-rooted antipathies of the English nation.  The history of the relation between the mother country and her dependency during Brake’s life, may be characterised as a commercial and legislative struggle between the imperial government and the Anglo-Irish interest, in which each side for its own convenience, as the turn served, drew support from the Catholic majority.

A Whiteboy outbreak, attended by the usual circumstances of disorder and violence, took place while Burke was in Ireland.  It suited the interests of faction to represent these commotions as the symptoms of a deliberate rebellion.  The malcontents were represented as carrying on treasonable correspondence, sometimes with Spain and sometimes with France; they were accused of receiving money and arms from their foreign sympathisers, and of aiming at throwing off the English rule.  Burke says that he had means and the desire of informing himself to the bottom upon the matter, and he came strongly to the conclusion that this was not a true view of what had happened.  What had happened was due, he thought, to no plot, but to superficial and fortuitous circumstances.  He consequently did not shrink from describing it as criminal, that the king’s Catholic subjects in Ireland should have been subjected, on no good grounds, to harassing persecution, and that numbers of them should have been ruined in fortune, imprisoned, tried, and capitally executed for a rebellion which was no rebellion at all.  The episode is only important as illustrating the strong and manly temper in which Burke, unlike too many of his countrymen with fortunes to make by English favour, uniformly considered the circumstances of his country.  It was not until a later time that he had an opportunity of acting conspicuously on her behalf, but whatever influence he came to acquire with his party was unflinchingly used against the cruelty of English prejudice.