It is not my purpose to enter in detail into the history of Ireland in the nineteenth century, but only to note a few salient points which will help us to a comparison with the progress of other parts of the Empire.  It is necessary to repeat that the basis upon which the whole economic structure of Ireland rested, the Irish agrarian system, was inconsistent with social peace and an absolute bar to progress.  I described in Chapter I. how it came into being and the collateral mischiefs attending it.  During the nineteenth century, by accident or design, these mischiefs were greatly aggravated.  Until 1815 high war prices and the low Catholic franchise stimulated subdivision of holdings, already excessively small, and the growth of population.  With the peace came evictions, conversions into pasture, and consolidation of farms.  The disfranchisement of the mass of the peasantry which accompanied Emancipation in 1829 inspired fresh clearances on a large scale and caused unspeakable misery, with further congestion on the worst agricultural land.  “Cottier” tenancy, at a competitive rent, and terminable without compensation for the improvements which were made exclusively by the tenant, was general over the greater part of Ireland.  Generally it was tenancy-at-will, with perpetual liability to eviction.  Leaseholders, however, were under conditions almost as onerous.  The labourer, who was allowed a small plot, which he paid for in labour, was in the worst plight of all.  In addition, burdensome tithes were collected by an alien Church and rents were largely spent abroad.  If Irish manufactures had not been destroyed, and there had been an outlet from agriculture into industry, the evil effects of the agrarian system would have been mitigated.  As it was, in one of the richest and most fertile countries in the world the congestion and poverty were appalling.  Competition for land meant the struggle for bare life.  Rent had no relation to value, but was the price fixed by the frantic bidding of hungry peasants for the bare right to live.  The tenant had no interest in improving the land, because the penalty for improvement was a higher rent, fixed after another bout of frantic competition.

“Almost alone amongst mankind,” wrote John Stuart Mill,[19] “the cottier is in this condition, that he can scarcely be either better or worse off by any act of his own.  If he were industrious or prudent, nobody but his landlord would gain; if he is lazy or intemperate, it is at his landlord’s expense.  A situation more devoid of motives to either labour or self-command, imagination itself cannot conceive.  The inducements of free human beings are taken away, and those of a slave not substituted.  He has nothing to hope, and nothing to fear, except being dispossessed of his holding, and against this he protects himself by the ultima ratio of a defensive civil war.  Rockism and Whiteboyism were the determination of a people, who had nothing that could be called theirs but a daily meal of the lowest description of food, not to submit to being deprived of that for other people’s convenience.