atural and respectable distinctions of birth and
fortune, but in the most odious of all distinctions, those of
religious and political prejudices--distinctions which, more than any
other, animate both the insolence of the oppressors and the hatred and
indignation of the oppressed.

The directions in which Irish improvement would move were clear from
the middle of the century to men with much less foresight than
Burke had. The removal of all commercial restrictions, either by
Independence or Union, on the one hand, and the gradual emancipation
of the Catholics, on the other, were the two processes to which every
consideration of good government manifestly pointed. The first proved
a much shorter and simpler process than the second. To the first
the only obstacle was the blindness and selfishness of the English
merchants. The second had to overcome the virulent opposition of the
tyrannical Protestant faction in Ireland, and the disgraceful but
deep-rooted antipathies of the English nation. The history of the
relation between the mother country and her dependency during Brake's
life, may be characterised as a commercial and legislative struggle
between the imperial government and the Anglo-Irish interest, in which
each side for its own convenience, as the turn served, drew support
from the Catholic majority.

A Whiteboy outbreak, attended by the usual circumstances of disorder
and violence, took place while Burke was in Ireland. It suited the
interests of faction to represent these commotions as the symptoms of
a deliberate rebellion. The malcontents were represented as carrying
on treasonable correspondence, sometimes with Spain and sometimes
with France; they were accused of receiving money and arms from their
foreign sympathisers, and of aiming at throwing off the English rule.
Burke says that he had means and the desire of informing himself to
the bottom upon the matter, and he came strongly to the conclusion
that this was not a true view of what had happened. What had happened
was due, he thought, to no plot, but to superficial and fortuitous
circumstances. He consequently did not shrink from describing it as
criminal, that the king's Catholic subjects in Ireland should have
been subjected, on no good grounds, to harassing persecution, and that
numbers of them should have been ruined in fortune, imprisoned, tried,
and capitally executed for a rebellion which was no rebellion at all.
The episode is only important as