Excerpt from The North American Review, Vol. 151
The reason is to be sought in old traditions of lawlessness, partly caused, partly aggravated, by the successive confiscations to which the land of Ireland has been subjected, and which, in combination with other circumstances, too long to dwell upon here, have produced in the minds of certain sections of the population a hereditary belief that in agrarian matters the operation of the law may, with advantage, be supplemented by intimidation and murder. Is such or such a landlord the titular holder of a great tract of country at a fixed rent which is merely nominal compared with the present value of the land? He is probably the descendant of some courtier of Elizabeth, James I., or Charles II., who long ago parted with his rights to any interest in his property beyond the "head rent." Does another such man hold his land on certain forms of long lease? This is not improbably because he has inherited his tenure from a Roman Catholic ancestor who was unable, while the penal laws were in force, to become the legal freeholder of land which he was prepared to buy and the owner was prepared to sell.
The general result of these and other historic causes was that in Ireland, towards the middle of the present century, the immediate recipients of the rent were in many cases middlemen and in many cases absentees; while the ultimate recipients were too often the mortgagees. The relations between landlord and tenant were determined in part, but only in part, by conditions recognized in courts. In Ulster there had grown up a definite and universally-accepted custom under which the tenant was practically copartner with his landlord in the ownership of certain rights attached to the soil; while in other parts of Ireland vague memories of an age in which custom, not contract, had determined the tenure of land, lingered in the minds of the people, on which they founded an obscure and ill-defined claim of right, not admitted in theory either by lawyers or landlords, yet not as a rule inconsistent with the practice of the latter. Add to all this a population which, while entirely dependent on agriculture, was far in excess of the agricultural capabilities of the country, and we find ourselves in face of a social system so ill compacted that the first serious shock was certain to produce a catastrophe.
The shock came in the shape of the potato famine of 1846. Of the suffering and ruin which this great calamity produced on tenant and on landlord it is not necessary, here to speak.
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