of the century, by the anti-Catholic passions it
inspired, wrecking new hopes of racial unity, to establish what came to
be known as the Ulster Custom of Tenant Right. If Protestant freemen had
to resort to these demoralizing methods to obtain, and then only after
irreparable damage to Ireland, the first condition of social stability,
a tolerable land system, the effect of the agrarian system on Catholic
Ireland, prostrate under the Penal Code, may be easily imagined.

In addition to excessive subdivision of holdings and excessive tithes,
rents, and local burdens, another agrarian evil, unknown in the vast and
thinly populated tracts of America intensified the misery of the Irish
peasantry of the eighteenth century. This was the conversion of the best
land from tillage into pasture, with the resulting clearances and
migrations, and the ultimate congestion on the worst land. Lecky quotes
a contemporary pamphlet, which speaks of the "best arable land in the
kingdom in immense tracts wantonly enjoyed by the cattle of a few
individuals, and at the same time the junctions of our highways and
streets crowded with shoals of mendicant fellow-creatures." This change
from arable to pasture has been a common and often in the long run a
healthy, economic tendency in many countries, England and Scotland
included, though temporarily a fruitful source of misery. Under normal
conditions the immediate evils right themselves in course of time.
Nothing was normal in Ireland, and any breath of economic change in the
outside world reacted cruelly on the wretched subject class, which
produced, though it did not enjoy, the greater part of the wealth of the
kingdom. Under an accumulation of hardships famine was periodic, and
from 1760, when the first Whiteboys appeared, disorder in one degree or
another was chronic. The motive, it is universally agreed now, was
material, not religious. The Whiteboys of the south and west were the
counterparts of the Protestant Steelboys and Oakboys of the north, and
even in the south and west there were Protestant as well as Catholic
Whiteboys. Lord Charlemont, the Protestant Irish statesman, denying this
now well-ascertained fact, was nevertheless explicit enough about the
cause of the disorders. "The real causes," he said, "were ... exorbitant
rents, low wages, want of employment, farms of enormous extent let by
their rapacious and indolent proprietors to monopolizing land-jobbers,
by whom small portions of t