fact, was nevertheless explicit enough about the cause of the disorders.  “The real causes,” he said, “were ... exorbitant rents, low wages, want of employment, farms of enormous extent let by their rapacious and indolent proprietors to monopolizing land-jobbers, by whom small portions of them were again let and relet to intermediate oppressors, and by them subdivided for five times their value among the wretched starvers upon potatoes and water; taxes yearly increasing, and still more tithes, which the Catholic, without any possible benefit, unwillingly pays in addition to his priest’s money ... misery, oppression, and famine."[6]

Agrarian crime, operating through an endless succession of secret societies, Whiteboys and Rightboys in the eighteenth century; Terry Alts, Rockites, Caravats, Ribbonmen, Moonlighters, in the nineteenth, was rampant for nearly two centuries, long surviving the repeal of the Penal Code; and its last echoes may be heard at this moment.  In the absence of all wholesome law, violence and terror were the only means of self-defence.  The remedy applied was retaliatory violence under forms of law.  Nothing whatsoever was done to remove the essential vices of agrarian tenure during the eighteenth century; nothing tentative even during the nineteenth century until the year 1870; nothing effective and permanent until 1881, when, as far as humanly possible, it was sought to give direct statutory expression to the Ulster Custom, with the addition of the principle of a fair judicial rent.  Englishmen should realize this when they discuss Irish character.  It is a very old story, but nine out of ten Englishmen, when talking vaguely of Irish discontent, disloyalty, and turbulence, forget, or have never learnt, this and other fundamental facts.  As for the Irish landlords, we must remember that the founders of that class differed in no respect from other English landlords, or from the aristocratic American concessionaires, just as their compatriot tenants and lessees were identical in stock with the American colonists.  Their descendants and successors have been the victims of circumstance.  Each generation has inherited the vested interests of the last, and it is not in human nature to look far behind vested interests into the wrongful acts which created them and the bad laws that perpetuate them.  Doubly victimized have been those resident landlords who at all periods, from the earliest era of colonization, in spite of temptation and bad examples around them, have acted towards their tenantry as humane and patriotic citizens.  A bad agrarian system infects the whole body politic.  Good landlords and contented tenants inevitably suffered with the rest.