f war, and Ireland was then
often left with not more than five thousand soldiers. No militia and
no constabulary force existed, but when Whiteboy or other disturbances
arose, the landlords put themselves at the head of their tenantry, and
usually succeeded in suppressing them. Law was very little observed;
industrial virtues were at the lowest ebb; there was abundance of
drunkenness, idleness, turbulence, neglect of duty, extreme ignorance,
and extreme poverty; but there was not much real oppression or
religious bigotry, and there were no signs of political disturbance or
conspiracy. After a few years the portions of the penal code which
restricted the Catholic worship became a dead letter, and Catholic
chapels were everywhere rising on the Protestant estates. The
monopoly, however, of place and power continued, though the legal
profession was full of professing converts. The theological
temperature in both sects had greatly subsided. Land was usually let
by the owner on long leases, and at very low rents, to tenants who
almost invariably divided and sublet their tenancies.

At a later period of the century, when population pressed closely on
subsistence, the system of middlemen produced a fierce competition
which raised rent in the lower grades to an enormous height, but this
evil was less felt with a scanty population, and the hierarchy of
tenants at least saved the landlords from the dangerous isolation
which their circumstances tended to produce. Arthur Young, who
examined the condition of the country very carefully between 1776 and
1778, perceived great signs of growing prosperity, especially in the
towns, and, although agriculture was far behind that of England, he
found a considerable number of active, intelligent, and improving
landlords. In the opinion of Young the rental of Ireland was unduly
and unnaturally low, but he urged the landlords to exercise a more
direct and controlling influence over their estates, and he
recommended them, for this purpose, to give leases for shorter periods
and gradually to abolish the system of middlemen and subletting.

In the north there was a powerful, intelligent Protestant community,
with a strong leaning to republicanism. They were chiefly
Presbyterians, and they resented bitterly the commercial restrictions
and the obligation of paying tithes to an Episcopal church. The Irish
Parliament was so constituted that they had no political power at all
equivalent to their import