ly would not have been any rent paid in the island
within the last fifty years, and that the armed resistance of the
tenants would have had the open or secret sympathy of the great bulk of
the American people. In truth, the importance of Irish crime as a
political symptom is grossly exaggerated by English writers. I venture
to assert that more murders unconnected with robbery are committed in
the State of Kentucky in one year than in Ireland in ten, and the
condition of some other Southern and Western States is nearly as bad.
All good Americans lament this and are ashamed of it, but it never
enters into the heads of even the most lugubrious American moralists
that Kentucky or any other State should be disfranchised and remanded to
the condition of a Territory, because the offences against the person
committed in it are so numerous, and the punishment of them, owing to
popular sympathy or apathy, so difficult.

There are a great many Englishmen who think that when they show that
Grattan's Parliament was a venal and somewhat disorderly body, which
occasionally indulged in mixed metaphor, they have proved the
impossibility of giving Ireland a Parliament now. But then, as they are
obliged to admit, Walpole's Parliament was very corrupt, and no one
would say that for that reason it would have been wise to suspend
constitutional government in England in the eighteenth century. It is
only through the pernicious habit of thinking of Irishmen as exceptions
to all political rules that Grattan's Parliament is considered likely,
had it lasted, to have come down to our time unreformed and unimproved.

Those have misunderstood me who suppose that I draw from the success of
the anti-rent movement in this State between 1839 and 1846 an inference
against "all attempts to enforce an unpopular law." Such was not by any
means my object. What I sought to show by the history of this movement
was that there was nothing peculiar or inexplicable in the hostility to
rent-paying in Ireland. The rights of the New York landlords were as
good in law and morals as the rights of the Irish landlords, and their
mode of asserting them far superior. Moreover, those who resisted them
were not men of a different race, religion, or nationality, and had, as
Mr. Dicey says, "none of the excuses that can be urged in extenuation of
half-starved tenants." Their mode of setting the law at defiance was
exactly similar to that adopted by the Irish, and it was persis