forget, or (more strictly speaking) have never understood, how
exceptional has been the path pursued by English civilization; they do
not realise to themselves that the gradual transformation of an
aristocratic and feudal society into a modern industrial State which
still retains the forms, and in many points of view the spirit of
feudalism is a process which, although owing to the most special
circumstances it has been accomplished with success in England, has
hardly a parallel in any other European country. Ireland on the other
hand has, despite the deviations from her natural course caused by her
connection with a powerful nation, tended to follow the lines of
progress pursued by continental countries, and notably by France. A
foreign critic like De Beaumont finds it far easier than could any
Englishman to enter into the condition of Ireland, and this not only
because he is as a foreigner delivered from the animosities or
partialities which must in one way or another warp every English
judgment, but mainly because the phenomena which puzzle an Englishman,
as for example the passion of Irish peasants for the possession of
land,[10] are from his own experience familiar and appear natural to a
Frenchman. What to the mind of a foreign observer needs explanation is
the social condition of England rather than of Ireland. He at any rate
can see at a glance that the relation between the two countries has
planted and maintained in Ireland an aristocracy, aristocratic
institutions, and above all an aristocratic land law, foreign to the
traditions and opposed to the interests of the mass of the people. Let
an observer for a moment take up the point of view natural to a
continental critic, and admit, in the language of De Beaumont, that the
primary radical and permanent cause of Irish misery has been the
maintenance in Ireland by England of a "bad aristocracy,"[10] or, to put
the same thing more generally, and it may be more fairly that the vice
of the connection between the two countries has consisted in its being a