s of human nature and life, to find
public instructors of the greatest pretension imputing the backwardness
of Irish industry, and the want of energy of the Irish people in
improving their condition, to a peculiar indolence and insouciance in
the Celtic race? Of all vulgar modes of escaping from the consideration
of the effect of social and moral influences on the human mind, the most
vulgar is that of attributing the diversities of conduct and character
to inherent natural differences."

The "civil war" referred to by Mill as the _ultima ratio_ of the
cottier tenant went on intermittently for ninety years of the nineteenth
century, as it had gone on during the eighteenth century, and was met by
coercive laws of the same general stamp. Until Mr. Gladstone took the
question in hand in 1870, no reformer could get a hearing in Parliament.
Bill after Bill, privately introduced, met with contemptuous rejection
in favour of some senseless measure of semi-military coercion. There
can, I believe, be no doubt that responsible Irish opinion, made
effective, would have grappled with the evil firmly and conscientiously.
Until the peasant class was driven to the last pitch of desperation,
their leaders did not conceive, and, indeed, never wholly succeeded in
implanting, the idea of a complete overthrowal of landlordism. The
peasant was not unwilling to pay rent. He had, and still has, a deep,
instinctive respect for a landed aristocracy, and was ready, and is
still ready, to repay good treatment with an intensity of devotion
difficult to parallel in other parts of the United Kingdom. In that
veritably cataclysmic dispersion of the Irish race which ensued upon the
great famine, rent continued to be paid at home out of sums remitted
from relatives in America. No less than nineteen millions of money were
thus remitted, according to the Emigration Commissioners of 1863,
between 1847 and that date. The Roman Catholic Church, as in every part
of the world, was strongly on the side of law and order, and, indeed, on
many occasions stepped in to condemn disorder legitimately provoked by
intolerable suffering. The wealthy and educated landlord class, face to
face in a free Parliament with the tenant class, including, be it
remembered, the Ulster Protestant tenants, with grievances less acute in
degree, but similar in kind, would have consented to meet reform halfway
under the stimulus of patriotism and an enlightened self-interest.
Against th