No advocate of Home Rule can find a clearer statement of the condition of things with which on his view the Imperial Parliament is morally incompetent to deal than in these words of De Beaumont’s; but before we hastily draw any inference from an undoubted fact, let us examine into the exact nature of the fact.  The opposition of Irish opinion to the law of the land is undoubted, but the opposition is not now, and if we appeal (as under the present argument we are appealing) to the teaching of history never has been general opposition to law, or even general opposition to English law.  The statistics of ordinary crime are (it is said) no higher in Ireland than in other parts of the United Kingdom.  A pickpocket or a burglar is as easily convicted in Ireland as elsewhere; the persons who lamentably enough are either left unpunished, or if punished may count on popular sympathy, are criminals whose offences, atrocious and cruel as they constantly are, are connected in popular opinion with political, and at bottom, it must be added, with agrarian questions.  For more than a century there has existed an hereditary conspiracy against the rights of the landowners.  The White Boys of 1760, the Steel Boys of 1772, the Right Boys of 1785, the Rockites of a few years later, the Thrashers of 1806, the White Boys who re-appear in 1811, 1815, 1820, the Terralts of 1831, the White Feet of 1833, the Black Feet of 1837;[18] later Ribbon men under different names, the Boycotters or the assassins who have added a terrible sanction to the commands of the Land League or of the National League, have each and all been, in most cases avowedly and in every case in fact, the vindicators or asserters of the just or unjust popular aversion to the rights of landlords given by the law and enforced by the courts of the land.  It would be folly to assert that all popular opposition to the law in Ireland had been connected with agrarian questions.  But if we look either to the experience of past generations, or to the transactions passing before our eyes, we can hardly be mistaken in holding that the main causes of disaffection have been either questions connected with religion, or rather with the position of Roman Catholics, or disputes connected with the possession of land.

The feeling of nationality has played a very subordinate part in fomenting or keeping alive Irish discontent.  The Repeal agitation, in spite of O’Connell’s legitimate influence, collapsed.  No one can read Sir Gavan Duffy’s most interesting account of the Young Ireland movement without perceiving that just because it was strictly a nationalist movement it took very little hold upon the people.  The Home Rule movement never showed great strength till it became avowedly a Land League, of which the ultimate result should be, by whatever means, to make the tenants of Ireland owners of their land.  To this add that in the judgment of foreign critics, and of thinkers like Mill, the popular protest against the maintenance in Ireland of a tenure combining the evils both of large estates and of minute subdivision of farms is founded upon justice.  De Beaumont at any rate teaches that to transform Irish tenants into peasant proprietors would be the salvation of the country:—­