subdivisions and extortions made an additional private profit, and who,
in his turn, would create a subsidiary agency, until the land in many
cases was "subset six deep."[5] The ultimate occupier and sole creator
of agricultural wealth lived perpetually on the verge of starvation,
beggared not only by extortionate rents, partly worked out in virtually
forced labour, but by extortionate tithes paid to the alien Anglican
Church, in addition to the scanty dues willingly contributed to the
hunted priests of his own prescribed religion. His resident upper
class--though we must allow for many honourable exceptions--was the
Squirearchy, satirized by Arthur Young as petty despots with the vices
of despots; idle, tyrannical, profligate, boorish, fit founders of the
worst social system the modern civilized world has ever known. The
slave-owning planters of Carolina were by no means devoid of similar
faults, which are the invariable products of arbitrary control over
human beings, but there the physiological gulf between the dominant and
subject race was too broad and deep to permit of substantial
deterioration in the former. In Ireland the ethnological difference was
small; the artificial cleavage and deterioration great in inverse
proportion.

For the greater part of a century, in every part of Ireland, tenancies
of land, whether held by Catholic or Protestant, by lease or at will,
were alike in certain fundamental characteristics. The tenant had
neither security of tenure nor right to the value of the improvements
which were invariably made by his own capital and labour. Even a
leaseholder, when his lease expired, had no prescriptive claim to
renewal, but must take his chance at a rent-auction with strangers, the
farm going to the highest bidder. If he lost, he was homeless and
penniless, while the fruits of his labour and capital passed into other
hands. The miserable Catholic cottier was, of course, in a similar case,