Present Irish Questions

by William O'Connor Morris

The wild Celtic rising of 1641 was followed by a rising of the old Englishry of the Pale—the descendants of the first Anglo-Norman settlers; both movements were probably encouraged from France; though widely different, they ran into each other. The great Civil War was now running its course in England; Ireland, for the most part, took the side of the king; the majority of Englishmen were certainly on the side of the Parliament. I cannot retrace the scenes of the contest in Ireland; after a fierce and protracted struggle, in which an envoy of the Pope became the representative of an ill-united Irish League; in which Preston and Ormond led the forces of the Pale, and Owen Roe O’Neill was at the head of the Irish Celts,—the whole island was subjugated by the sword of Cromwell, as it never had been subjugated before. Drogheda and Wexford are names of woe in the annals of Ireland; but the conquest of the Protector, ruthless as it was, was not so cruel as that of the Elizabethan soldiers; if deeply stained with blood, it was rapid and completely decisive. The colony in Ulster had begun to flourish; Cromwell designed a scheme for the colonisation of the vanquished country more thorough and extensive than any which had been designed before. Three-fourths of Ireland had been in arms against the Parliament; that assembly had made grants by anticipation of Irish forfeited lands to ‘adventurers’ who had advanced it moneys; an opportunity for immense confiscations had arisen; the Protector was not slow to take advantage of it; his Puritan fanaticism, his hatred of the Irish people, especially of its ‘idolatrous Papists,’ his strong English and religious sympathies, united to confirm him in his purpose. The forfeited lands in four of the Irish counties were appropriated to the Commonwealth and its uses; those in eighteen were to be granted to the ‘adventurers’ and the soldiery of the late conquest; those in seven were to be allotted to the army in England. The grants were to be either free, or to be purchased at nominal prices; the owners, who had lost their lands, were to be deported to Connaught—‘Hell’ was the alternative, the tradition runs—and ‘Courts of Claims,’ as they were called, were to be set up, to adjudicate on the conduct of those who were to be dispossessed—they were to be subjected to a test which scarcely one could satisfy—and practically to measure confiscation out under the pretence of law. By these means Cromwell calculated that some forty thousand colonists, of English blood and of the Puritan faith, would be poured into the millions of acres which the sword had placed in the hands of his Government; these would form a prosperous settlement loyal to England; would keep rebellion in Ireland for ever down; and would regenerate a land taken from a race akin to the Amalekites of old. As a foretaste of the new and glorious order of things, Sir William Petty, a very able man, remarkably skilful in feathering his own nest, made a cadastral survey of Ireland, which still remains.

Cromwell’s scheme of confiscation was thoroughly carried out, spite of much angry wrangling between the Puritan warriors. The remains of the defeated Irish armies went, in thousands, into exile in foreign lands; they were the heralds of the renowned soldiery who, for a century and a half, were deadly, but honourable foes of the British name. The rule of the Protector in Ireland was stern but enforced peace; Ireland was prostrate in the exhaustion of despair; there is much proof that, under the Cromwellian settlement, the country made a kind of material progress. But Cromwell’s great scheme of colonisation failed, as such schemes had failed in many instances before; a large majority of the ‘adventurers’ and the soldiers sold their possessions, usually for a mere nothing: many ‘degenerated’ like the old Norman families, and, won over by the spells ‘of the daughters of Heth,’ had, in one or two generations, become ‘mere Irish.’ The ultimate result of the Cromwellian conquest was to establish in Ireland three or four thousand owners of the soil, of English blood and Puritan leanings, without the support of inferior dependents, in the midst of a vanquished population hostile in race and faith; the sentiments thus engendered have never died out; to this day ‘a Cromwellian landlord’ is a name of reproach in Catholic Ireland. At the Restoration hope for a moment revived in the hearts of the ruined owners, who had been dispossessed by Cromwell, and of whom hundreds had fought for the Crown; but this was dashed by the perfidy of Charles II. and his courtiers; the Cromwellian forfeitures were, in the main, confirmed; large tracts were given back to favourites of the Stuarts, but thousands of beggared families lost their estates for ever through a policy of cruel baseness and wrong. Ireland remained quiescent for nearly thirty years; she even prospered under the wise rule of Ormond—one of the noblest figures in her unhappy history; but the bitter memories of the past lived in the conquered people, though, as has repeatedly been seen in a Celtic race, they were treasured in silence, and caused little apparent trouble. James II. ascended the throne in 1685; he had a great opportunity to mitigate many of the wrongs of Ireland; he might have removed some of the evils of the Cromwellian conquest, and have effected changes in the settlement of the land, which, at least, would have done partial justice. But the unfortunate king was a bigot, and, in no sense, a statesman; like his father he tried the desperate policy of making use of Ireland in his designs against English liberties; he sent Tyrconnell to Dublin, and, in a few months, revolution had broken out through the country; English and Protestant Ireland was well-nigh trampled underfoot; Catholic and Celtic Ireland rose up in a wild hope of revenge. I cannot even glance at the stirring events that followed; the descendants of ruined barons of the Pale and of Celtic princes driven from their lands and their homes, joined in a great effort to raise a large armed force; the rising almost assumed a national aspect; but after the Boyne and the fall of Limerick, it was finally quelled by William III. The process of confiscation was once more renewed; thousands of acres were taken forcibly from those who had resisted in the field, and were handed over to a new race of colonists belonging to the blood and the creed of the victors; and the shameful violation of a solemn Treaty made all that was cruel in spoliation worse.

The era of conquest in Ireland and of confiscation by force—an agony prolonged for a century and a half—was brought to an end in the reign of William III. This is not the place to examine the question on which side, as between England and Ireland, the balance of the wrongs that were done inclines; but if much that is cruel and shameful is to be laid to the charge of England, Ireland, it cannot be forgotten, crossed her path repeatedly in an age of grave national perils and troubles, and, moreover, wrecked her own cause by her wretched dissensions. The Irish land had now nearly all fallen into the hands of a caste of owners, of English and Scottish descent, and in faith Protestant, divided from a people of Catholic occupiers for the most part of the Irish race; wide lines of demarcation had been drawn between them; and there was no middle class to bridge over the gulf. In a part of Ulster alone where the proprietors and the holders of the soil were largely of the same religion and blood, was there the promise of a more auspicious order of things; even here causes of disunion were not wanting. Nor were these the only vices and dangers of a land system which has scarcely had a parallel. Enormous tracts had been bestowed on owners who never saw their estates; absenteeism existed to an immense extent; their lands, too, had, in thousands of instances, been underlet to a class of intermediate owners, who were to form a body of most oppressive landlords. In addition, the representatives of numbers of ruined families still vegetated on the domains which had been their own; the few families which had escaped from the spoilers, were held in reverence by the peasantry around; elements of disorder and trouble continued to fester. The destruction, too, of the old Celtic modes of land tenure, and the substitution of the English system, had unjustly annihilated tribal rights wholesale; the free, and other dependents of the Irish chiefs, had sunk into the position of mere tenants at will, that is, at the mercy of foreign and often unknown masters. One of the worst, if not the most apparent evil, of the gigantic confiscations which had taken place, and on which the land system had, so to speak, been founded, was that the respect which attaches to the ancient ownership of land, and which forms, perhaps, its surest support, could hardly exist in any part of Ireland; the disastrous consequences may be traced to the present hour. Landlords, with titles of yesterday, won by the sword, could not feel the interest in their estates and in the inhabitants on them, naturally felt by owners of gentle and ancient descent; the land which, as has been said, had been flung like a fox to ravening hounds, could not attract to it happy and peaceful memories; the very Government had learned to think it could deal with the land as it pleased, and treated the rights gained by confiscation with contempt. Prescription, the strongest cement of property, had no place in this ill-compacted land system.[37]

The era of Protestant ascendency bringing Catholic subjection with it, had now set in for many years in Ireland; its evils were aggravated by harsh divisions of race, and by more than a century of bitter memories; its effects were more conspicuous in the land than in other social relations. This unnatural and calamitous position of affairs might, however, have been replaced ere long by a better order of things, had it not been artificially maintained and made enduring by legislation unexampled for its far-reaching cruelty. I cannot attempt to describe the Penal Code of Ireland; in the emphatic words of Burke, ‘it was a complete system, full of coherence and consistency; well digested and well composed in all its parts; it was a machine of wise and elaborate contrivance; and as well fitted for the oppression, impoverishment, and degradation of a people, and the debasement in them of human nature itself, as ever proceeded from the perverted ingenuity of man.’[38] The objects of these execrable laws were threefold: to exclude the Irish Catholic whether of Anglo-Irish or Celtic descent—misfortune had well-nigh effaced the distinction—from every office of trust in the State, from every profession, almost from every walk of life; to persecute and proscribe the Catholic Church of Ireland, and to place its priesthood under a humiliating ban, and finally to ruin and degrade the few remaining Catholic owners of the soil; to prevent the Irish Catholic from acquiring any real interest in it; and, above all, to keep the Catholic peasantry in a condition of thraldom.[39] The Code was only too successful in compassing its ends; I pass from its operation as regards the two first, to point out how it sought to attain the third, and how its provisions affected the Irish land and the manifold relations connected with it. The estate of the Irish Catholic owner was not to follow the ordinary courses of descent; it was ‘to gavel,’ and to be divided among many persons; this was for the avowed purpose of making ‘the landed property of Papists crumble away, and disappear.’ The Irish Catholic owner was subjected to cruel enactments that literally set his household against him; his wife and children were bribed to become his foes; law sate at his hearth to make his existence wretched. The Irish Catholic, too, was forbidden to acquire land by purchase or even to possess an incumbrance on it; as far as possible the ownership of land was strictly confined to the Protestant caste. But the wrong that, in its consequences at least, was perhaps the worst, was that the Catholic occupier of the Irish soil could not obtain anything like an advantageous tenure; he could not have a lease for a period beyond thirty-one years, and this, too, at an excessive rent; and, in the great mass of instances, he was a serf holding merely at will.

The forty years that succeeded the death of William III. are certainly the most mournful period in Irish history. The memories of conquest and confiscation were still fresh; the Penal Code kept Catholic Ireland in its chains; society was fashioned on the type of the domination of a class, separated from a whole community in race and faith. Nothing was left undone to perpetuate this evil order of things; the Irish Parliament was a mere oligarchy of the sons of the colonists of Elizabeth, Cromwell, and William, apart from a few leading men in Ulster; its legislation for the vanquished race was barbarous; Lords-Lieutenant spoke of the Irish Catholics as of ‘the common enemy;’ a ‘Papist was presumed not to exist’ in the Irish Courts of Justice. Meanwhile the penal laws were relentlessly carried out for years; the Irish Catholic was placed under a universal ban; the Catholic Church of Ireland lay, as it were, in the valley of the shadow of death. But the direst consequences appeared in the land, and in the social life of the landed classes; these were most calamitous and have still left their traces. Many of the few Catholic owners abandoned their estates, and carried their swords into foreign lands, where some rose to well-deserved eminence; a small number conformed to the dominant faith in order to exist in comparative peace at home; the majority clung to their lands and bowed their heads to oppression. The Protestant lords of the soil were what their antecedents and the law had made them; they were long a harsh and exacting order of men, filled with bigotry and the pride of a conquering race; they regarded the inferiors they ruled as pariahs and helots. But, as usually happens, when society is in an unnatural state, they did not prosper amidst the ruins around them; their lands were kept on a kind of pernicious mortmain, as they could not mortgage or sell them freely; absenteeism with all its mischiefs greatly increased; and middleman tenures largely multiplied, subjecting the peasantry to a detestable breed of landlords, Protestants and of English descent, like their superiors, but much worse tyrants. As for the mass of the Catholic occupiers of the soil, they were kept down in the lowest state of serfdom; but multitudes found their way into foreign armies; ‘the wild geese,’ as they were pathetically called, flew to Austria and, above all, to France, where, in the ranks of the celebrated Irish Brigade—‘ever and everywhere’ true to the Bourbon lilies—they won renown at Dettingen, Fontenoy, and other fields of fame. The aspect of Ireland bore too faithful witness to the misery engendered in this evil order of things. The country was still covered with the wrecks of the late wars; the habitations, even of the Protestant gentry, were squalid and mean; the towns were, in many instances, sinking into decay; the peasantry were huddled together into villages of huts; the traveller roamed through vast wastes of unfenced pasturage, evidences of a land almost left in a state of nature. Hideous famines were of repeated occurrence; one, that of 1739-41, swept the population away in tens of thousands; the Irish Parliament characteristically did nothing to help the sufferers; it met the emergency by strengthening the means to enforce the payment of rent. The miserable condition of Ireland was made worse by the legislation of the British Parliament, which treated the country as a conquered colony; and, true to the principles of the mercantile system, impeded or prevented the growth of several Irish industries. This was, of course, most injurious to the Protestant settlers; but these were held down by the ruling power; as was finely said, ‘they knelt to England on the necks of their countrymen.’ The state of things in the colonised parts of Ulster was somewhat better; but the Scottish and Presbyterian population of this corner of Ireland had not a few causes of serious complaint.[40]

In the next generation a great but gradual change passed over the state of the Irish community. The Penal Code was not in letter relaxed; but the evil spirit which had conceived it lost much of its force. The men who had fought at the Boyne and at Aghrim had passed away; the human conscience, moved by the influences of the eighteenth century, revolted from the barbarous legislation of a half-fanatical age. The Irish Catholics slowly began to make themselves felt in the State; many amassed large fortunes in foreign commerce; shut out as they still were by law from almost every profession and office, they made their way into the medical calling, and especially at the Bar, where their disabilities were evaded or ignored. The Catholic Church was no longer proscribed; its worship, indeed, was still carried on under degrading conditions; but its priesthood were permitted to perform their sacred functions in peace; its dignitaries were even countenanced by the men in power at the Castle. This great social change was conspicuously seen in the land; landed relations were markedly improved, and partly transformed. The Catholic owners were permitted to hold their estates free from the cruel vexations of the past; they began to live on terms of friendship with the Protestant caste; legal fictions annulled the laws which had made their lives wretched; their lands were, in many instances, held by the Protestant gentry on secret trusts; and these, though contrary to law, were, as a rule, most honourably fulfilled. The principal, however, and most decisive change appeared in the position and the sentiments of the Protestant lords of the soil. As time rolled on, and threw its kindly growths over the settlement of confiscation and the sword, these men began to feel that Ireland was their country and home; they became, to a certain extent, Irishmen; they felt sympathy, by degrees, with the conquered serfs in their midst. This feeling was strengthened by the tyrannous selfishness of the British Parliament, which treated Ireland as if she were its footstool, and of the official class, nearly all Englishmen, who lorded it over the land they despised; an ‘Irish interest’ grew up in the Parliament at College Green, composed very largely of the Protestant landlords; this became patriotic, in a certain sense, and a protector of the scanty rights of Ireland. As social order, too, was seldom disturbed, the wealth of the country had considerably increased; the gentry acquired a greater interest in their estates, and became more and more attached to them; absenteeism, as the result, perceptibly lessened; and middleman tenures, though still prevalent, diminished remarkably in the more progressive counties. The deep lines of demarcation which kept apart the owners and the occupiers of the soil were thus to a certain extent bridged over; the Irish landlord, especially if resident, became a kindlier superior than his fathers had been; the Irish peasant became less a stranger to him.

The evidences of this better order of things became manifest on the face of the country. Agriculture, though still backward, made real progress; the breeds of farming animals greatly improved; the huge breadths of pasturage had a less deserted aspect. The country towns had generally advanced; the land had been opened by good roads; the means of locomotion had been largely multiplied. The rental of Ireland had doubled within living memory; in some counties, indeed, it was nearly as high as it is now; the land was at a price of more years’ purchase than it is at the close of the nineteenth century. It was at this period that the great country houses of Ireland were built, and their vast demesnes laid out; the wages of labour were low, but had distinctly risen; the peasant hind, Arthur Young tells us, in point of food and clothing, was as well off as his fellow in England. The land was largely parcelled out into considerable farms; but small holdings were on the increase; and the cottar system, in the course of time to become a source of manifold evils, was not yet a cause of much mischief; the pressure of population on the soil was not severely felt. Many of the great landlords, too, were excellent men; they ruled the country well, and greatly improved their estates; in numberless instances they had won the hearts of dependents, who regarded them as kind masters. Yet the picture was not without a dark side; this land system still had evil, nay, repulsive, features. Except in the best part of Ulster the deep divisions of race and faith continued to be profoundly marked; the Penal Code had made these, to a great extent, indelible. There was still much oppression and exaction in landed relations; the class of small landlords and the class of middlemen were too generally tyrannical and harsh; complaints of over-renting were not infrequent; and if the great landlords, as a rule, were not severe superiors, many were extravagant, addicted to excess, and reckless duellists; they bore a strong resemblance to the seigneurie of the old French Monarchy. The peasantry, too, remained serfs, illiterate, ignorant, and superstitious; the good feelings they often had for their lords had too much of the submissiveness of the slave; and virtuous as their women ordinarily were, they too generally yielded to the lusts of their masters. The habitations, besides, of this population were still wretched; if their lot had assuredly become better, it was often hard, above all, degraded. They had begun to feel more acutely the ills they suffered; in many counties they had banded themselves together into lawless leagues, to protect themselves and to resist authority. These associations, known by the general name of Whiteboys—perhaps taken from the Camisards of the Cevennes—had as their objects the preservation of rights of commonage, the extinction of tithes, and the reduction of rents; they may be traced back to the great confiscations of the past; they were held together by secret leaders and passwords; and they often kept whole districts in a state of terror. A Draconic Code was directed against them; though often put down they have risen to life again; Ireland has never since been completely free from them; their influence still is distinctly apparent. Associations of somewhat a similar kind, known as Steelboys and Oakboys, were formed even in the good parts of Ulster; but they were much less dangerous and were not permanent. It is a characteristic of Whiteboyism, as it has ever since been called, that it has always had a political side, and lends itself to revolutionary movements against government itself.[41]

Though Protestant ascendency was still supreme at this period, the confiscations of the past had not been forgotten; they were treasured in the minds of the descendants of the old Catholic families, and of the population among which they lived. The extinction, too, of the tribal Irish tenures, had, we have seen, been a cause of grievous wrongs; this was a tradition, also, handed down from father to son, and was still fresh in the remembrance of a whole race. The land system, though to outward seeming secure, nevertheless rested on unstable foundations, as was to appear in the course of time; another element of disturbance was being formed, which ultimately was to have immense force. Under the modes of land tenure, which prevailed in England, since the system of small holdings had been broken up, the land had generally been laid out in large farms; partly from this circumstance, and partly owing to custom, the charge of making permanent improvements of the land had almost everywhere devolved on the owner of the soil; a tenant, who rented a farm, took it, so to speak, equipped with the buildings and other things of the kind that were suitable to it. But in Ireland, partly because small farms were numerous, and partly because the custom had never grown up—the history of the past fully accounts for this—the permanent improvements were very seldom made by the landlord; the tenant, who held land, had to add, as it were, its plant to it; he had to do much that gave it any real value. As the inevitable result, the Irish occupier of the soil felt that he had acquired a concurrent right in it; this, if the improvements were solid and lasting, might almost amount to a partial joint-ownership, at least give him, in equity, a real hold on the land. But a right of this kind was not recognised by the law, founded as this was upon notions of English tenure; it was liable to be destroyed should the tenant be dispossessed; and as the tenure of the immense majority of the occupiers of the soil in Ireland was either at will, or for a short term at a high rent, this right, essentially of a quasi-proprietary kind, was made precarious, and had no legal protection. With the prescience of genius, Burke perceived the evils that might grow out of this state of things, though, as yet, these were not much felt; he saw that it discouraged improvement of almost every kind; especially he saw that the denial of legal sanction to the rights in the land a tenant might have, and the fact that his tenure was short and uncertain, might become a source of grave wrong, and of far-reaching discontent. In a word, he detected an economic vice in the land system of Ireland which, in the long run, was to do great mischief; and curiously enough he indicated the remedies that ought to be applied, and pointed out the true principles of a reform of Irish land tenure. It would have been well had British statesmen adopted these; his simple, just, and statesmanlike plan puts to shame the ill-designed and unsuccessful attempts that have been made to recast the Irish land system of late years, and the false, reckless, and socialistic theories at present current on this important subject.[42]

I must pass over even the main events of the history of Ireland, after this period, up to the close of the eighteenth century. The ‘Irish interest,’ mainly composed of the great landed gentry, and turning to account the American War, compelled the Parliament at Westminster to relax many of the commercial restraints on Ireland, and to concede her a partial free trade; under the guidance of the illustrious Grattan it obtained legislative independence for the Irish Parliament. At the same time the Penal Code was largely repealed; the Irish Catholic was permitted to acquire the ownership of the soil; before long he received the electoral franchise, though he was still excluded from the Irish Houses of Lords and Commons. In these circumstances, Ireland made real material and social progress; the wealth of the country rapidly increased; the Protestant and Catholic upper classes began to unite in marriage; a commercial middle class, if still very weak, grew up. Ireland seemed about to enter a happier era; yet there were drawbacks to this partial welfare, especially as regards the land system. Middleman tenures were becoming much less frequent; absenteeism was markedly on the decline; but partly owing to their contact with the Parliament in College Green, and to the brilliant social life it created in Dublin, the landed gentry became more extravagant than their fathers had been; they began to raise their rents and to encumber their estates; over-renting became more common than before; Whiteboy movements and agrarian disorder prevailed in many districts. Ireland, however, probably would have made a great advance but for the evil passions which the French Revolution engendered in the frame of a society still deeply diseased. I cannot dwell on the unhappy years that followed, leading to the Rebellion of 1798; I must confine myself to their influence on the Irish land system. The object of Tone and of the United Irish leaders was to combine Scottish and Presbyterian Ulster, and the great mass of the Irish Catholics, into a league against British rule and for ‘Irish freedom;’ unhappily, they were but too successful. They appealed, not in vain, to thousands of farmers and traders in the Northern Province, who had long had solid grounds of discontent, and had been deeply stirred by the Revolution in France; they laid hold on the elements of disorder and of division of race and faith, abounding in Catholic Ireland, but largely concealed, and called on the peasantry to overthrow their Protestant tyrants, and to strike a decisive blow in ‘the cause of Ireland.’ Evil incentives were recklessly employed to arouse popular passions; maps of the old confiscated lands were made; and active emissaries went through the country, reviving dangerous traditions of the past, and stimulating the worst sentiments of hatred, greed, and revenge. As the result, sedition ran riot in Ulster; in the Southern Provinces there was a great outburst of Whiteboy crime, and a widespread rising against the payment of rent; and thousands of the occupiers of the soil were swept into the United Irish ranks, scarcely conscious of the perils to which they were exposed. How the movement led to the bloody rebellion of 1798, and how this was put down after a desperate struggle, it is unnecessary to consider here; the consequences in Irish landed relations were most unfortunate. It is untrue that the large majority of the owners of the Irish soil were guilty of the crimes that have been laid to their charge; but they bitterly resented the allusions to the confiscations of a bygone past; they became more estranged from their inferiors than they had been for years.[43]

This terrible outbreak shook society in Ireland to its base, revived the old divisions of race and faith which had been disappearing to a considerable extent, and left memories behind which have not been forgotten. Its inevitable result was to lead to the Union, a measure long in the contemplation of British statesmen, and especially of Pitt, and perhaps necessary in the most critical circumstances of the time. I cannot even refer to the events attending this great constitutional change; a large majority of the leading Irish landlords disliked it at heart; but a minority, alarmed for their possessions, gave it support; how strong this feeling was may be seen in a famous speech of Lord Clare, who described the whole order of men as ‘the heirs of confiscation hemmed in by enemies brooding on their wrongs.’ The Union greatly weakened the influence of the Irish landed gentry, which had been very powerful in the defunct Parliament; the ‘Irish interest,’ for many years a real force, was almost subverted; English officials became again supreme at the Castle; a bureaucracy gradually began to supplant the aristocracy of landlords in every sphere of government. As respects the land and landed relations, the class of Catholic owners slowly augmented; but the consequences were trivial and not marked; middleman tenures continued steadily to disappear; but absenteeism certainly increased, though absentee estates were usually better managed than before. Meanwhile causes of grave importance, tending to momentous social results, were profoundly affecting the whole land system, and the position of the classes dependent on it. Partly owing to the corn laws of the Irish Parliament, partly to the extension of the Parliamentary franchise, in 1793, to the great mass of the Catholic peasantry, but principally to the effects of the long war with France, Ireland, it may be said, was well-nigh changed from a pastoral to an agricultural country; large farms were generally replaced by small; the land in most districts was divided into little tillage holdings; the cottar system multiplied apace; the population, about three millions of souls in the day of Arthur Young, increased to more than six millions at the Peace of 1815; and this population becoming every year more dense, for the most part eked existence out on a precarious root. The economic and social consequences were very great, and continued in operation during a long series of years. The competition for the possession of land became intensely keen; rents were unnaturally forced up in thousands of cases; the value of landed property enormously rose; all this encouraged extravagance among the landed gentry, and especially induced them largely to encumber their estates. At the same time the wages of labour distinctly declined; the condition of the Irish labouring peasant, when Edward Wakefield, a very industrious and able observer, wrote on the state of Ireland in 1812, was markedly worse than it had been in the time of Arthur Young. Yet these were not the most serious, at least, the most lasting, effects of the revolution taking place in landed relations. As the large farm system was being broken up, as the small farm system had come in its stead, and as population had rapidly grown, the occupiers of the soil had more and more made the permanent additions to their holdings; they had built, fenced, and reclaimed land, more and more; and in the general eagerness to obtain the possession of land, considerable sums were often paid for farms on their transfer. The concurrent rights of the tenant classes in Ireland had thus become enormously increased; they often amounted, equitably, to a real joint-ownership; yet these rights were without the support of law, and were liable to be extinguished often at the mere will of the landlord. In Ulster alone, in its Presbyterian and Scottish parts, where the landed classes had been less disunited than in the South, a custom, now of considerable strength, had for a long time made the tenure of the peasant comparatively secure; yet even this was not under the ægis of law.[44]