Whiteboys. Lord Charlemont, the Protestant Irish statesman, denying this
now well-ascertained fact, was nevertheless explicit enough about the
cause of the disorders. "The real causes," he said, "were ... exorbitant
rents, low wages, want of employment, farms of enormous extent let by
their rapacious and indolent proprietors to monopolizing land-jobbers,
by whom small portions of them were again let and relet to intermediate
oppressors, and by them subdivided for five times their value among the
wretched starvers upon potatoes and water; taxes yearly increasing, and
still more tithes, which the Catholic, without any possible benefit,
unwillingly pays in addition to his priest's money ... misery,
oppression, and famine."[6]

Agrarian crime, operating through an endless succession of secret
societies, Whiteboys and Rightboys in the eighteenth century; Terry
Alts, Rockites, Caravats, Ribbonmen, Moonlighters, in the nineteenth,
was rampant for nearly two centuries, long surviving the repeal of the
Penal Code; and its last echoes may be heard at this moment. In the
absence of all wholesome law, violence and terror were the only means of
self-defence. The remedy applied was retaliatory violence under forms of
law. Nothing whatsoever was done to remove the essential vices of
agrarian tenure during the eighteenth century; nothing tentative even
during the nineteenth century until the year 1870; nothing effective and
permanent until 1881, when, as far as humanly possible, it was sought
to give direct statutory expression to the Ulster Custom, with the
addition of the principle of a fair judicial rent. Englishmen should
realize this when they discuss Irish character. It is a very old story,
but nine out of ten Englishmen, when talking vaguely of Irish
discontent, disloyalty, and turbulence, forget, or have never learnt,
this and other fundamental facts. As for the Irish landlords, we must
remember that the founders of that class differed in no respect from