The aim was to reduce the Catholics to poverty, ignorance, and impotence, and the aim was successful.  Of the laws against priests, worship, education, and of the bars to commerce and the professions, I need not speak.  In the matter of property, the fundamental enactments concerned the land, namely, that no Catholic could own land, or lease it for more than thirty years, and even then on conditions which made profitable tenure practically impossible.  This law created and sustained the serfdom I have described, and is the direct cause of the modern land problem.  It remained unaltered in the smallest respect for seventy years, that is, until 1761, when a Catholic was permitted to lease for sixty-one years as much as fifty acres of bog not less than four feet deep.  Long before this the distribution of landed property and the system of land tenure had become stereotyped.

This system of tenure was one of the worst that ever existed on the face of the globe.  It has been matched in portions of India, but nowhere else in this Empire save in little Prince Edward Island, where we shall meet with it again.  In Ireland, where it assumed its worst form, violent conquest by a neighbouring power not only made it politic to outlaw the old owners, but precluded the introduction of the traditional English tenures, even into the relations between the British superior landlord and the British occupying colonist.  The bulk of the confiscated Irish land, as I have mentioned, had been granted in fee to English noblemen, gentlemen, or speculators, who planted it with middle or lower-class tenants.  A number of Cromwell’s private soldiers settled in Leinster and Munster, and, holding small farms in fee, formed an exception to this rule.  But the greater part of Ireland, in ownership, as distinguished from occupation, consisted of big estates, and a large number of the English owners, being only a day’s sail from England, became, by natural instinct, habitual absentees.  Others lived in Dublin and neglected their estates.  Absenteeism, non-existent in America, assumed in Ireland the proportions of an enormous economic evil.  In England the landlord was, and remains, a capitalist, providing a house and a fully equipped farm to the tenant.  In Ireland he was a rent receiver pure and simple, unconnected with the occupier by any healthy bond, moral or economic.  The rent-receiving absentee involved a resident middleman, who contracted to pay a stipulated rent to the absentee, and had to extract that rent, plus a profit for himself, out of the occupiers, whether Catholic serfs, Protestant tenants, or both, and usually did so by subdivision of holdings and disproportionate elevation of rents.  Over three of the four Provinces of Ireland—­for a small part of Ulster was differently situated—­the middleman himself frequently became an absentee and farmed his agency to another middleman, who by further subdivisions and extortions made an additional private profit, and who, in his turn, would create a subsidiary