granted by the concessionaires in the seventeenth century, fixity of tenure was implied, and a nominal rent levied, somewhat after the American model; but under the example of other Provinces, and the economic pressure exerted by the growth in the Catholic population, these privileges seem to have been almost wholly obliterated.  The absentee landlords, reckless of social welfare, exacted the rack or competitive rent.  As in the south and west, tithes to the Established Church and oppressive and corrupt local taxation for roads and other purposes, aggravated the discontent.  For agrarian reasons only—­and there were others which I shall mention—­many thousands of Protestants left Ireland for ever.  It required a long period of outrage and conspiracy, attaining in 1770 the proportions of a small civil war, and at the end of the century, by the anti-Catholic passions it inspired, wrecking new hopes of racial unity, to establish what came to be known as the Ulster Custom of Tenant Right.  If Protestant freemen had to resort to these demoralizing methods to obtain, and then only after irreparable damage to Ireland, the first condition of social stability, a tolerable land system, the effect of the agrarian system on Catholic Ireland, prostrate under the Penal Code, may be easily imagined.

In addition to excessive subdivision of holdings and excessive tithes, rents, and local burdens, another agrarian evil, unknown in the vast and thinly populated tracts of America intensified the misery of the Irish peasantry of the eighteenth century.  This was the conversion of the best land from tillage into pasture, with the resulting clearances and migrations, and the ultimate congestion on the worst land.  Lecky quotes a contemporary pamphlet, which speaks of the “best arable land in the kingdom in immense tracts wantonly enjoyed by the cattle of a few individuals, and at the same time the junctions of our highways and streets crowded with shoals of mendicant fellow-creatures.”  This change from arable to pasture has been a common and often in the long run a healthy, economic tendency in many countries, England and Scotland included, though temporarily a fruitful source of misery.  Under normal conditions the immediate evils right themselves in course of time.  Nothing was normal in Ireland, and any breath of economic change in the outside world reacted cruelly on the wretched subject class, which produced, though it did not enjoy, the greater part of the wealth of the kingdom.  Under an accumulation of hardships famine was periodic, and from 1760, when the first Whiteboys appeared, disorder in one degree or another was chronic.  The motive, it is universally agreed now, was material, not religious.  The Whiteboys of the south and west were the counterparts of the Protestant Steelboys and Oakboys of the north, and even in the south and west there were Protestant as well as Catholic Whiteboys.  Lord Charlemont, the Protestant Irish statesman, denying this now well-ascertained