tence. The rise of wages and prices has diffused comfort through
all classes. ... Probably no country in Europe has advanced so rapidly
as Ireland within the last ten years, and the tone of cheerfulness, the
improvement of the houses, the dress, and the general condition of the
people must have struck every observer.[26] ... If industrial
improvement, if the rapid increase of material comforts among the poor,
could allay political discontent, Ireland should never have been so
loyal as at present.

"Nor can it be said that ignorance is at the root of the discontent. The
Irish people have always, even in the darkest period of the penal laws,
been greedy for knowledge, and few races show more quickness in
acquiring it. The admirable system of national education established in
the present century is beginning to bear abundant fruit, and, among the
younger generation at least, the level of knowledge is quite as high as
in England. Indeed, one of the most alarming features of Irish
disloyalty is its close and evident connection with education. It is
sustained by a cheap literature, written often with no mean literary
skill, which penetrates into every village, gives the people their first
political impressions, forms and directs their enthusiasm, and seems
likely in the long leisure of the pastoral life to exercise an
increasing power. Close observers of the Irish character will hardly
have failed to notice the great change which since the famine has passed
over the amusements of the people. The old love of boisterous
out-of-door sports has almost disappeared, and those who would have once
sought their pleasures in the market or the fair now gather in groups in
the public-house, where one of their number reads out a Fenian
newspaper. Whatever else this change may portend, it is certainly of no
good omen for the future loyalty of the people.

"It was long customary in England to underrate this disaffection by
ascribing it to very transitory causes. The quarter of a century that
followed the Union was marked by almost perpetual disturbance; but this
it was said was merely the natural ground swell of agitation which
followed a great reform. It was then the popular theory that it was the
work of O'Connell, who was described during many years as the one
obstacle to the peace of Ireland, and whose death was made the subject
of no little congratulation, as though Irish discontent had perished
with its organ. It was as if, the AEoli