“Is it not, then, a bitter satire on the mode in which opinions are formed on the most important problems of human nature and life, to find public instructors of the greatest pretension imputing the backwardness of Irish industry, and the want of energy of the Irish people in improving their condition, to a peculiar indolence and insouciance in the Celtic race?  Of all vulgar modes of escaping from the consideration of the effect of social and moral influences on the human mind, the most vulgar is that of attributing the diversities of conduct and character to inherent natural differences.”

The “civil war” referred to by Mill as the ultima ratio of the cottier tenant went on intermittently for ninety years of the nineteenth century, as it had gone on during the eighteenth century, and was met by coercive laws of the same general stamp.  Until Mr. Gladstone took the question in hand in 1870, no reformer could get a hearing in Parliament.  Bill after Bill, privately introduced, met with contemptuous rejection in favour of some senseless measure of semi-military coercion.  There can, I believe, be no doubt that responsible Irish opinion, made effective, would have grappled with the evil firmly and conscientiously.  Until the peasant class was driven to the last pitch of desperation, their leaders did not conceive, and, indeed, never wholly succeeded in implanting, the idea of a complete overthrowal of landlordism.  The peasant was not unwilling to pay rent.  He had, and still has, a deep, instinctive respect for a landed aristocracy, and was ready, and is still ready, to repay good treatment with an intensity of devotion difficult to parallel in other parts of the United Kingdom.  In that veritably cataclysmic dispersion of the Irish race which ensued upon the great famine, rent continued to be paid at home out of sums remitted from relatives in America.  No less than nineteen millions of money were thus remitted, according to the Emigration Commissioners of 1863, between 1847 and that date.  The Roman Catholic Church, as in every part of the world, was strongly on the side of law and order, and, indeed, on many occasions stepped in to condemn disorder legitimately provoked by intolerable suffering.  The wealthy and educated landlord class, face to face in a free Parliament with the tenant class, including, be it remembered, the Ulster Protestant tenants, with grievances less acute in degree, but similar in kind, would have consented to meet reform halfway under the stimulus of patriotism and an enlightened self-interest.  Against the great majority of Irish landlords there was no personal charge.  They came into incomes derived from a certain source under ancient laws for which they were not responsible.  But, acting through the ascendancy Parliament far away in London, they remained, as an organized class—­for we must always make allowance for an enlightened and public-spirited minority—­blind to their own genuine interests and to the demands of humane