364 RURAL ECONOMY OF ENGLAND. 



plant it by force in Ireland ; but the more England 

 persevered, the more determined was Ireland to remain 

 Catholic. The war of nationalities now took the character 

 of a religious war the most unsparing of all, as it gives 

 to worldly interests and feelings the excuse of a faith. 

 After unexampled efforts, England at last succeeded in 

 establishing in Ireland a Protestant community, to the ex- 

 tent of one-fifth of its population, the remaining four-fifths 

 being Catholic. The former chiefly resided in the towns, 

 and the latter in the country. The proprietors belonging 

 in general to one religion, and the farmers to another, there 

 could be no bond of connection between the two classes, 

 but everything to disunite them. Confiscations, which 

 had made the one masters of the soil, and reduced 

 the other to the condition of helots, had not been accom- 

 plished without frightful bloodshed. These sanguinary 

 recollections, continually revived by legal persecutions, 

 stirred up animosity to frenzy. Proprietors took good 

 care not to live upon their lands where they were 

 exposed to personal violence, and their representatives 

 the middlemen absented themselves for the same 

 reason. Both from a distance oppressed a people whom 

 they detested, and they were answered with maledictions, 

 and often by murders. 



Besides its absolute necessity as a means of progress, 

 rent, in most civilised countries, is justified by the expen- 

 diture of that capital which, in process of time, is put into 

 the soil. There are few lands, whether in France or Eng- 

 land, the actual value of which represents anything else 

 than this capital. Often even their value is far from re- 

 presenting the total amount of money they have absorbed. 

 In Ireland, property had not this justification, which other- 

 wise might have legitimised its revolutionary origin. Kent 

 was not employed for the benefit of the land from which 



