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class; such as at the present moment do more to prevent real unity between the inhabitants of the two islands making up the United Kingdom than do unjust laws or vicious institutions. To a student who regards with philosophic calmness a topic which has mainly been dealt with by politicians or agitators, it easily becomes apparent that the crimes or failures of England, no less than the vices or miseries of England, have to a great extent flowed from causes too general to be identified with the intentional wrong-doing either of rulers or of subjects. One fact thrusts itself upon the attention of any serious student England and Ireland have from the commencement of their ill-starred connection been countries standing on different levels or at different stages of civilization; they have moreover been countries impelled by the force of circumstances towards a different development. Englishmen forget, or (more strictly speaking) have never understood, how exceptional has been the path pursued by English civilization; they do not realise to themselves that the gradual transformation of an aristocratic and feudal society into a modern industrial State which still retains the forms, and in many points of view the spirit of feudalism is a process which, although owing to the most special circumstances it has been accomplished with success in England, has hardly a parallel in any other European country. Ireland on the other hand has, despite the deviations from her natural course caused by her connection with a powerful nation, tended to follow the lines of progress pursued by continental countries, and notably by France. A foreign critic like De Beaumont finds it far easier than could any Englishman to enter into the condition of Ireland, and this not only because he is as a foreigner delivered from the animosities or partialities which must in one way or another warp every English judgment, but mainly because the phenomena which puzzle an Englishman, as for example the passion of Irish peasants for the possession of land,[10] are from his own experience familiar and appear natural to a Frenchman. What to the mind of a foreign observer needs explanation is the social condition of England rather than of Ireland. He at any rate can see at a glance that the relation between the two countries has planted and maintained in Ireland an aristocracy, aristocratic institutions, and above all an aristocratic land law, foreign to the tra
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