The immediate cause is clear.  The failure of Reform is the key to the Rebellion and the Union.  In a patriotic anxiety to idealize Grattan’s Parliament, with a view to justifying later claims for autonomy, Irishmen have generally shut their eyes to this cardinal fact, and have preferred to dwell with exaggerated emphasis on the little good that Parliament did rather than on the enormous evils which it not only left untouched, but scarcely observed.  We must remember that it was not only a Protestant body, but a close body of landlords, with an infusion of lawyers and others devoted to the interest of landlords.  In that capacity it was incapable of diagnosing, much less of remedying, the gravest material ills of Ireland.  In the very narrow domain where the landlord interest was not concerned, as in industrial and commercial matters, Parliament seems to have acted on the whole with wisdom.  It endeavoured to encourage industries, while refusing to squander its newly won commercial powers in waging tariff wars with Great Britain, where prohibitive duties against Irish goods still continued to be imposed.  But Ireland was no longer an industrial country.  All the encouragement in the world could not replace lost aptitudes or bring back the exiled craftsmen who, during a century past, had left Ireland to enrich European countries with their skill.  The favoured linen industry alone survived to reach its present flourishing condition.  The revival in other manufactures, even in that of wool, which was remarkably rapid and strong, seems to have been artificial and transient.  No wonder; for, while Ireland had been stagnant for a century, her great competitor, England, had been steadily building up that capacity for organized industry which, under the inventive genius of Arkwright, Hargreaves, and Watt, and the economic genius of Adam Smith, made the last twenty years of the eighteenth century such a marvellous period of industrial expansion, and eventually converted England from an agricultural into a manufacturing nation.  Ireland was hopelessly late in the race.  On the other hand, the fertile land of Ireland remained as the indestructible source of wealth and the prime means of subsistence for the great bulk of the four and a half million souls who inhabited the country.  Parliament seems to have been almost indifferent to the miseries of the agricultural population, wholly indifferent, certainly, to their source, the vicious agrarian system which it was the interest of its own members to sustain.  Foster’s famous Corn Law without doubt increased tillage, and, in conjunction with the inflated prices for produce caused by the French War, gave a powerful though a somewhat unhealthy impulse to the trade in corn.  But it enriched only the landlords, and left untouched the real abuses, absenteeism, middlemanism, insecurity of tenure, rack-rents, and tithes.  The Whiteboy risings of the sixties and seventies recurred, and were met with Coercion Acts as stupid and cruel as those of the nineteenth century.  The tithe grievance, which festered and grew into civil war in the nineteenth century, was never touched.  While tenants in North-East Ulster were painfully and forcibly establishing their custom of tenant right in the teeth of the law, the inhuman system of cottier tenancy, which was to last until 1881, became more and more firmly rooted in other parts of Ireland.