The Irish land system suffered from the same ills as we all know the political institutions to have suffered from—­a partial and intermittent conquest.  Land holding in Ireland remained largely based on the tribal system of open fields and common tillage for nearly eight hundred years after collective ownership had begun to pass away in England.  The sudden imposition upon the Irish, early in the seventeenth century, of a land system which was no part of the natural development of the country, ignored, though it could not destroy, the old feeling of communistic ownership, and, when this vanished, it did not vanish as it did in countries where more normal conditions prevailed.  It did not perish like a piece of outworn tissue pushed off by a new growth from within:  on the contrary, it was arbitrarily cut away while yet fresh and vital, with the result that where a bud should have been there was a scar.

This sudden change in the system of land-holding was followed by a century of reprisals and confiscations, and what war began the law continued.  The Celtic race, for the most part impoverished in mind and estate by the penal laws, became rooted to the soil, for, as we have seen, they had, on account of the repression of industries, no alternative occupation, and so became, in fact, if not in law, adscripti glebae.  Upon the productiveness of their labour the landlord depended for his revenues, but he did little to develop that productiveness, and the system which was introduced did everything to lessen it.[3] The wound produced by the original confiscation of the land was kept from healing by the way in which the tenants’ improvements were somewhat similarly treated.  I do not mean that they were systematically confiscated—­the Devon and Bessborough Commissions, as well as Gladstone, bore witness to the contrary—­but the right and the occasional exercise of the right to confiscate operated in the same way.  In the Irish tenant’s mind dispossession was nine-tenths of the law.

An enlightened system of land tenure might have made prosperity and contentment the lot of the native race, and, perhaps, have rendered possible such a solution of the Irish problem as was effected between England and Scotland two centuries ago.  What was chiefly required for agrarian peace was a recognition of that sense of partnership in the land—­a relic of the tribal days—­to which the Irish mind tenaciously adhered.  But, like most English concessions, it was not granted until too late, and then granted in the wrong way.  The natural result was that, when at last the recognition of partnership was enacted, it became a lever for a demand for complete ownership.  But this was the aftermath, for in the meantime, from the seed sown by English blundering, Ireland—­native population and English garrison alike—­had reaped the awful harvest of the Irish famine, which was followed by a long dark winter of discontent.  Upon the England that sowed the wind there was visited a whirlwind of hostility from the Irish race scattered throughout the globe.