Fourthly,—­To the same source as religious persecution are due the whole crop of difficulties connected with the tenure of land.

When James I. determined that the old Brehon law was to be abolished, and an appeal to the law of England to be brought within the reach of every Irishman, he and his ministers meant to introduce a beneficial reform.  They hoped that out of the old tribal customs a regular system of landowning according to the English tenure would be developed.  In forcing on this change, English statesmen felt convinced not only that they were reformers, but that they were promoters of justice.  To a generation trained under the teaching of lawyers like Coke, and accustomed to regard the tenure which prevailed in England as good in itself, it must have appeared that to pass from the irregular dominion of uncertain customs to the rule of clear, definite law, was little less than a transition from anarchy and injustice to a condition of order and equity.  They acted in precisely the spirit of their descendants, who are absolutely assured that the extension of English maxims of government throughout India must be a blessing to the population of the country, and shape their Egyptian policy upon their unwavering faith in the benefits which European control must of necessity confer on Egyptian fellahs.  If, however, it is probable that King James meant well to his Irish subjects, it is absolutely certain that his policy worked gross wrong.  His scheme only provided for the more powerful members of the tribes, and took no account of the inferior members, each of whom in their degree had an undeniable if somewhat indefinite interest in the tribal land.  Sir John Davis, who carried out the plan, seems to have thought that he had gone quite far enough in erecting the sub-chiefs into freeholders.  It never occurred to him that the humblest member of the tribe should, if strict justice were done, have received his allotment out of the common territory; and the result of his settlement accordingly was that the tribal land was cut up into a number of large freehold estates which were given to the most important personages among the native Irish, and the bulk of the people were reduced to the condition of tenants at will.[15] An intended reform produced injustice, litigation, misery, and discontent.  The case is noticeable, for it is a type of a thousand subsequent English attempts to reform and improve Ireland.  The rulers of the country were influenced by ideas different from those of their subjects.  Ignorance and want of sympathy produced all the evils of cruelty and malignity.