had spent his life in battling after a rude fashion for the security of life and property in that troublous region; his weaker son had rendered himself liable on at least one occasion to the imputation of preferring popularity to justice.[1] Under the spendthrift rule of the possessor at this date there was little prospect of improvement. The adjoining Shelburne estates had for the most part been long since leased to middlemen.
If, however, the County Kerry might have been considered as affording an extreme example of lawlessness, the rest of Ireland was in this respect not much better situated.
The whole territory of the island had been confiscated at least once, after the successive invasions of English colonists under Henry II., James I., and Cromwell; but while the earlier settlers had for the most part become identified with the original population, the actual owners of the soil were still regarded in many districts by the great mass of the population as tenants under a wrongful title. The Government ever since the time of Henry VII. had been conducted on contradictory principles. A Parliament existed, but deprived of a truly representative character, owing to the existence of the political disabilities under which the Catholic population suffered, so that while possessed of some of the forms it lacked the substance of constitutional liberty. The industrial prosperity of the Protestant minority which possessed the franchise was crushed by the shortsighted commercial system of England. And yet, notwithstanding confiscations, political disabilities, penal laws, and commercial restrictions, some progress had been made, especially during the past twenty years. The recent rise in the price of meat had caused a great increase in the production of cattle, and wealth began to accumulate in consequence, while the trade in linen, the only manufacture not suffering from the evil effects of the English commercial system, was prospering. But with that strange tendency which improvement in Ireland has, according to a great states-
- ↑ Froude, English in Ireland, i. 476.
