been said against the Irish land
laws, and many of them are justified. But the Irish land laws in their
old working were simply rather an exaggerated form of the very same
laws that have survived in England right up to the present moment. Why
is it that these laws proved intolerable in Ireland, and have yet
survived up to the present moment in England? Simply because, after the
passing of the Act of Union, they were aggravated by the great and
terrible social evil of Absenteeism.

Even those bad laws could be made to work as long as there was a human
relationship between the landlords and their tenants. Up to 1830, at
any rate, there was a strong motive for that relationship. The victory
of Catholic emancipation was a colossal triumph for the genius of
Daniel O'Connell. It removed one of the worst surviving religious
injustices in this kingdom. But in Ireland it was a victory of the
tenant over the landlord, and it was achieved by a new alliance between
tenant and priest against the landlord. While giving emancipation to
the Catholics, the Act of 1830 also raised the level of the franchise,
and abolished the forty shilling freehold vote, thus removing the
landlord's motive for preserving the small tenancies.

The result was that the Irish landlords as a class--always, of course,
with many conspicuous individual exceptions--entered from 1830 onwards
upon a new career of hostility towards their tenants, amounting to
little less than a passion for revenge. Being, for the most part, both
Protestant and Absentee, they lost all interest in their tenantry,
except that of rent collectors. The Irish famine made matters far
worse. For the famine deprived the Irish tenant, for the moment, of the
power of paying rent. Not only so, but by reducing him to pauperism it
turned him into a distinct and definite burden on the rates.

The Irish landlords then first conceived the idea that, by getting rid
of the people, they could save their pockets. At the same time, they
made the great discovery that beasts were more profitable than
peasants. Hence the great clearances and evictions of the period
between 1840-1870. Hence the cruel compulsory exodus of vast masses of
the people of Ireland to the shores of America. Hence, finally, the
bitter cleavage between landlords and tenantry which brought the whole
land system of Ireland crashing into ruin.

These disasters had one good effect. They roused the Irish people from
their indifference