Sixty years after the event, when Burke revisited Ireland, some
important changes had taken place. The English settlers of the
beginning of the century had formed an Irish interest. They had become
Anglo-Irish, just as the colonists still further west had formed a
colonial interest and become Anglo-American. The same conduct on
the part of the mother country promoted the growth of these hostile
interests in both cases. The commercial policy pursued by England
towards America was identical with that pursued towards Ireland. The
industry of the Anglo-Irish traders was restricted, their commerce
and even their production fettered, their prosperity checked, for the
benefit of the merchants of Manchester and Bristol. _Crescit Roma
Albae ruinis_. "The bulk of the people," said Stone, the Primate, "are
not regularly either lodged, clothed, or fed; and those things which
in England are called necessaries of life, are to us only accidents,
and we can, and in many places do, subsist without them." On the
other hand, the peasantry had gradually taken heart to resent their
spoliation and attempted extirpation, and in 1761 their misery
under the exactions of landlords and a church which tried to spread
Christianity by the brotherly agency of the tithe-proctor, gave birth
to Whiteboyism--a terrible spectre, which, under various names and
with various modifications, has ridden Ireland down to our own time.

Burke saw the Protestant traders of the dependency the victims of
the colonial and commercial system; the Catholic landowners legally
dispossessed by the operation of the penal laws; the Catholic
peasantry deeply penetrated with an insurgent and vindictive spirit;
and the Imperial Government standing very much aloof, and leaving the
country to the tender mercies of the Undertakers and some Protestant
churchmen. The Anglo-Irish were bitterly discontented with the