one, the Primate, "are
not regularly either lodged, clothed, or fed; and those things which
in England are called necessaries of life, are to us only accidents,
and we can, and in many places do, subsist without them." On the
other hand, the peasantry had gradually taken heart to resent their
spoliation and attempted extirpation, and in 1761 their misery
under the exactions of landlords and a church which tried to spread
Christianity by the brotherly agency of the tithe-proctor, gave birth
to Whiteboyism--a terrible spectre, which, under various names and
with various modifications, has ridden Ireland down to our own time.

Burke saw the Protestant traders of the dependency the victims of
the colonial and commercial system; the Catholic landowners legally
dispossessed by the operation of the penal laws; the Catholic
peasantry deeply penetrated with an insurgent and vindictive spirit;
and the Imperial Government standing very much aloof, and leaving the
country to the tender mercies of the Undertakers and some Protestant
churchmen. The Anglo-Irish were bitterly discontented with the
mother country; and the Catholic native Irish were regarded by their
Protestant oppressors with exactly that combination of intense
contempt and loathing, and intense rage and terror, which their
American counterpart would have divided between the Negro and the Red
Indian. To the Anglo-Irish the native peasant was as odious as the
first, and as terrible as the second. Even at the close of the century
Burke could declare that the various descriptions of the people were
kept as much apart as if they were not only separate nations, but
separate species. There were thousands, he says, who had never talked
to a Roman Catholic in their whole lives, unless they happened to talk
to a gardener's workman or some other labourer of the second or third
order; while a little time before this they were so averse to have
them near their persons, that they would not employ even those who
could never find their way beyond the stables. Chesterfield, a
thoroughly impartial and just observer, said in 1764 that the poor
people in Ireland were used worse than negroes by their masters and
the middlemen. We should never forget that in the transactions with
the English Government during the eighteenth century, the people
concerned were not the Irish, but the Anglo-Irish, the colonists
of 1691. They were an aristocracy, as Adam Smith said of them, not
founded in the n