the peace came
evictions, conversions into pasture, and consolidation of farms. The
disfranchisement of the mass of the peasantry which accompanied
Emancipation in 1829 inspired fresh clearances on a large scale and
caused unspeakable misery, with further congestion on the worst
agricultural land. "Cottier" tenancy, at a competitive rent, and
terminable without compensation for the improvements which were made
exclusively by the tenant, was general over the greater part of Ireland.
Generally it was tenancy-at-will, with perpetual liability to eviction.
Leaseholders, however, were under conditions almost as onerous. The
labourer, who was allowed a small plot, which he paid for in labour,
was in the worst plight of all. In addition, burdensome tithes were
collected by an alien Church and rents were largely spent abroad. If
Irish manufactures had not been destroyed, and there had been an outlet
from agriculture into industry, the evil effects of the agrarian system
would have been mitigated. As it was, in one of the richest and most
fertile countries in the world the congestion and poverty were
appalling. Competition for land meant the struggle for bare life. Rent
had no relation to value, but was the price fixed by the frantic bidding
of hungry peasants for the bare right to live. The tenant had no
interest in improving the land, because the penalty for improvement was
a higher rent, fixed after another bout of frantic competition.

"Almost alone amongst mankind," wrote John Stuart Mill,[19] "the cottier
is in this condition, that he can scarcely be either better or worse off
by any act of his own. If he were industrious or prudent, nobody but his
landlord would gain; if he is lazy or intemperate, it is at his
landlord's expense. A situation more devoid of motives to either labour
or self-command, imagination itself cannot conceive. The inducements of
free human beings are taken away, _and those of a slave not
substituted_. He has nothing to hope, and nothing to fear, except being
dispossessed of his holding, and against this he protects himself by the
_ultima ratio_ of a defensive civil war. Rockism and Whiteboyism were
the determination of a people, who had nothing that could be called
theirs but a daily meal of the lowest description of food, not to submit
to being deprived of that for other people's convenience.

"Is it not, then, a bitter satire on the mode in which opinions are
formed on the most important problem