The Irishry preferred to misgovern themselves as Catholics and small-holders, and the ...

The Irishry preferred to misgovern themselves as Catholics and small-holders, and the Englishry, after a few generations, were all too ready to take up the part of tribal chiefs.

To analyse the Irish trouble into racial,

religious, and agrarian

is impossible because in Irish history these three are one, and when England had conceded Catholic emancipation against her own Protestants, and insisted on agrarian reform against the Irish landlords, and both in vain, the logic of history left her no alternative but to concede all the rest, never quite understanding what it was the Irish wanted or why they wanted it.

Thus throughout the nineteenth century Ireland was an

uneasy place in the body politic

which could be neither forgotten nor assuaged. In the thirties it is tithes and crime.

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