BOOK disposition. Had the new owners of the soil resided V. on their estates, had they taught their unwilling tenants that the rule of England meant the rule of justice, had colonies of Scots and Englishmen been scattered over the land, had the Irish been able to learn by the contrast the material advantages of industry and energy, had they found in their conquerors beneficent masters who would have put down. wrong doing and oppression of man by man, who would have erected schools for their children, who would have treated them as human beings and helped them to live in decency, they were not framed so differently from the coinmon posterity of Adam but that in time their prejudices would have given way. But to four-fifths of the Irish peasantry the change of masters meant only a grinding tyranny, and tyranny the more unbearable because inflicted by aliens in blood and creed. Under their own chiefs they had been miserable, but they were suffering at least at the hands of their natural sovereigns; and the clansman who bore his lord's name, and if harshly used by his own master, was protected by him against others, could not feel himself utterly without a friend. But the oppression of the peasantry in the last century was not even the oppression of a living man-it was the oppression of a system. The peasant of Tipperary was in the grasp of a dead hand. The will of a master whom he never saw was enforced against him by a law irresistible as destiny. The absentee landlords of Ireland had neither community of interest with the people nor sympathy of race. They had no fear of provoking their resentment, for they lived beyond their reach. They had no desire for their welfare, for as individuals they were ignorant of their existence. They regarded their Irish estates as the sources of their income; their only desire was to extract the most out of them which the soil could be made to yield; and they cared no more for the souls and bodies of those who were in fact committed to their charge than the owners of a West Indian plantation for the herds of slaves whose backs were blistering in the cane fields. Thus universally through the southern provinces there was settled and sullen discontent. The peasantry continued to regard the land as their own; and with the general faith that wrong cannot last for ever, they waited for the time when they would once more have possession of it. 'The lineal descendants of the old families,' wrote Arthur Young, in 1774, are now to be found all over the kingdom, working as cottiers on the lands which were once their own. In such great revolutions of property the ruined proprietors have usually been extirpated or banished. In Ireland the case was otherwise, and it is a fact that in most parts of the kingdom the descendants of the old land-owners regularly transmit by testamentary deed the memorial of their right to those estates which once belonged to their families.'1 Acts of savage ferocity which burst out from time to time showed that the volcanic fires were unextinguished, and might at any moment break out once more; and all along there was a secret connection between local agrarian passion and political disaffection. The Irish brigade served as an escape valve for the fiercer enthusiasts. The clergy had been directed from Rome to support the claims of the Pretender, and the Pretender's cause was never popular with the indigenous Irish. They had not 1 Tour in Ireland, vol. ii., p. 133. CHAP. I. V. BOOK forgiven the Act of Settlement or the cowardice which had betrayed them on the Boyne. They were ready, however, if a chance offered itself, and if there was no better outlook, to take arms in his favour; and although Lord Trimleston might have said truly that the Catholic gentry had ceased to take an interest in the Stuart cause, he was deceiving himself or deceiving the Viceroy when he undertook to speak for the Catholics as a whole. Coincidently with the intended invasion and the appearance on the coast of M. Thurot, began the celebrated Whiteboy disturbances in Tipperary. Many causes had combined at that moment to exasperate the normal irritation of the southern peasantry. With the growth of what was called civilisation, absenteeism, the worst disorder of the country, had increased. In Charles the Second's time the absentees were few or none. But the better Irish gentlemen were educated, and the more they knew of the rest of the world, the less agreeable they found Ireland and Irish manners; while the more they separated themselves from their estates, the more they increased their rents to support the cost of living elsewhere. The rise in prices, the demand for salt beef and salt butter for exportation and for the fleets,' were revolutionising the agriculture of Munster. The great limestone pastures of Limerick and Tipperary, the fertile meadow land universally, was falling into the hands of capitalist graziers, in whose favour the landlords, or the landlords' agents, were evicting the smaller tenants. 1 The war gave an enormous stimulus to the salt beef trade. Not only were the English fleets supplied from Cork, but the French and Spanish as well. Meath, and Waterford there are to be found the greatest graziers and cowkeepers, perhaps, in the world: some who rent and occupy from 3,000l. to 10,000l. a year.—Arthur 2 In Limerick, Tipperary, Clare, Young, vol. ii., p. 102. I. They had the aims of English men of business with- CHAP. out the redeeming features of the English character. Their object was to make money, and they cared not at what cost to the people that object was attained; while they combined with their unscrupulousness the worst vices of the worst class of the lower Irish gentry, and were slovenly, extravagant, and dissipated. To the peasantry these men were a curse. Common lands, where their own cows had been fed, were enclosed and taken from them. The change from tillage to grazing destroyed their employment. Their sole subsistence was from their potato gardens, the rents of which were heavily raised, while, by a curious mockery of justice, the grass lands were exempt from tythe, and the burden of maintaining the rectors and vicars of the Established Church was cast exclusively on the Catholic poor. Among a people who are suffering under a common wrong there is a sympathy of resentment which links them together without visible or discoverable bond. In the spring of 1760 Tipperary was suddenly overrun by bands of midnight marauders. Who they were was a mystery. Rumours reached England of insurgent regiments drilling in the moonlight; of French officers observed passing and repassing the Channel ; but no French officer could be detected in Munster. The most rigid search discovered no stands of arms, such as soldiers use or could use. This only was certain, that white figures were seen in vast numbers, like moving clouds, flitting silently at night over field and 1 These graziers are too apt to attend to their claret as much as to their bullocks; they live expensively; and being enabled from the nature of their business to pass nine-tenths of the year without BOOK V. moor, leaving behind them the tracks of where they had passed in levelled fences and houghed and moaning cattle; where the owners were specially hateful, in blazing homesteads, and the inmates' bodies blackening in the ashes. Arrests were generally useless. The country was sworn to secrecy. Through the entire central plains of Ireland the people were bound by the most solemn oaths never to reveal the name of a confederate, or give evidence in a court of justice. When subpoenaed, forced to appear, and thus to perjure themselves on one side or the other, they preferred to keep the oath to their friends. Thus it was long uncertain how the movement originated, who were its leaders, and whether there was one or many. Letters signed by Captain Dwyer or Joanna Meskell were left at the doors of obnoxious persons, ordering lands to be abandoned under penalties. If the commands were uncomplied with, the penalties were inexorably inflicted. In one fortnight four innocent girls, who had the misfortune to be the children of wealthy parents on Captain Dwyer's black list, were carried off, violated, and forced into marriage with the ceremonies which have been described elsewhere. Torture usually being preferred to murder, male offenders against the Whiteboys were houghed like their cattle, or their tongues were torn out by the roots. Another favourite amusement was to seize some poor wretch in his bed, carry him naked to a hill side, fling him into a pit lined with thorns, and filling in the earth to his chin, leave him to live or die.1 1 Many Whiteboy letters are preserved in Dublin Castle. On March 11, 1760, Captain Dwyer gave notice that a certain John Harden had taken the lands of a |