The character which he gives of Irish landlordism deserves to be quoted: 

“The Cromwellian landowners soon lost their religious character, while they retained all the hardness of the fanatic and the feelings of Puritan conquerors towards a conquered Catholic people.  ’I have eaten with them,’ said one, ’drunk 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 motive of destiny had made them 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."[42]

Mr. Goldwin Smith deals with agrarian crime thus: 

“The atrocities perpetrated by the Whiteboys, especially in the earlier period of agrarianism (for they afterwards grew somewhat less inhuman), are such as to make the flesh creep.  No language can be too strong in speaking of the horrors of such a state of society.  But it would be unjust to confound these agrarian conspiracies with ordinary crime, or to suppose that they imply a propensity to ordinary crime either on the part of those who commit them, or on the part of the people who connive at and favour their commission.  In the districts where agrarian conspiracy and outrage were most rife, the number of ordinary crimes was very small.  In Munster, in 1833, out of 973 crimes, 627 were Whiteboy, or agrarian, and even of the remainder, many, being crimes of violence, were probably committed from the same motive.

“In plain truth, the secret tribunals which administered the Whiteboy code were to the people the organs of a wild law of social morality by which, on the whole, the interest of the peasant was protected.  They were not regular tribunals; neither were the secret tribunals of Germany in the Middle Ages, the existence of which, and the submission of the people to their jurisdiction, implied the presence of much violence, but not of much depravity, considering the wildness of the times.  The Whiteboys ’found in their favour already existing a general and settled hatred of the law among the great body of the peasantry.’[43] We have seen how much the law, and the ministers of the law, had done to deserve the peasant’s love.  We have seen, too, in what successive guises property had presented itself to his mind:  first as open rapine; then as robbery carried on through the roguish technicalities of an alien code; finally as legalized and systematic oppression.  Was it possible that he should have formed so affectionate a reverence either for law or property as would be proof against the pressure of starvation?"[44] “A people cannot be expected to love and reverence oppression because it is consigned to the statute-book, and called law."[45]