agency, until the land in many cases was “subset six deep."[5] The ultimate occupier and sole creator of agricultural wealth lived perpetually on the verge of starvation, beggared not only by extortionate rents, partly worked out in virtually forced labour, but by extortionate tithes paid to the alien Anglican Church, in addition to the scanty dues willingly contributed to the hunted priests of his own prescribed religion.  His resident upper class—­though we must allow for many honourable exceptions—­was the Squirearchy, satirized by Arthur Young as petty despots with the vices of despots; idle, tyrannical, profligate, boorish, fit founders of the worst social system the modern civilized world has ever known.  The slave-owning planters of Carolina were by no means devoid of similar faults, which are the invariable products of arbitrary control over human beings, but there the physiological gulf between the dominant and subject race was too broad and deep to permit of substantial deterioration in the former.  In Ireland the ethnological difference was small; the artificial cleavage and deterioration great in inverse proportion.

For the greater part of a century, in every part of Ireland, tenancies of land, whether held by Catholic or Protestant, by lease or at will, were alike in certain fundamental characteristics.  The tenant had neither security of tenure nor right to the value of the improvements which were invariably made by his own capital and labour.  Even a leaseholder, when his lease expired, had no prescriptive claim to renewal, but must take his chance at a rent-auction with strangers, the farm going to the highest bidder.  If he lost, he was homeless and penniless, while the fruits of his labour and capital passed into other hands.  The miserable Catholic cottier was, of course, in a similar case, though relatively his hardship was less, since his condition, being the lowest possible in all circumstances, could scarcely be worse.  Obviously, in a case where the landlord was neither the capitalist nor the protector and friend of the tenant, the possession of those elementary rights, security of tenure and compensation for improvements, was the condition precedent to the growth of a sound agrarian system.  Their denial was incompatible with social order.  Yet they were denied, and for one hundred and eighty years an intermittent struggle to obtain them by violence and criminal conspiracy degraded and retarded Ireland.

But a marked distinction grew up between a small portion of Ireland and the rest.  James I.’s plantation of Ulster had been far more drastic and thorough than any operation of the kind before or since.  Later immigrants had flowed in, and at the beginning of the eighteenth century in the north-eastern portion—­the predominantly Protestant Ulster of to-day—­Scotch Protestant tenants, mainly Presbyterian, were thickly settled, and formed an industrious community of strong and tenacious temper.  In the original leases