Lastly, to complete the picture, these two countries are in some sort interwoven with each other--they meet at every point, and yet they are more distinct, more completely separated, than if the ocean rolled between them.' Does not this picture look very like Ireland?
To make it more like, let us imagine that the Norman king had lived in Paris, and kept a viceroy in London--that the English parliament were subordinate to the French parliament, composed exclusively of Normans, and governed by Norman undertakers for the benefit of the dominant State--that the whole of the English land was held by ten thousand Norman proprietors, many of them absentees--that all the offices of the government, in every department, were in the hands of Normans--that, differing in religion with the English nation, the French, being only a tenth of the population, had got possession of all the national churches and church property, while the poor natives supported a numerous hierarchy by voluntary contributions--that the Anglo-Norman parliament was bribed and coerced to abolish itself, forming a union of England with France, in which the English members were as one to six.

Imagine that in consequence of rebellions the land of England had been confiscated three or four times, after desolating wars and famines, so that all the native proprietors were expelled, and the land was parcelled out to French soldiers and adventurers on condition that the foreign 'planters' should assist in keeping down 'the mere English' by force of arms.

Imagine that the English, being crushed by a cruel penal code for a century, were allowed to reoccupy the soil as mere tenants-at-will, under the absolute power of their French landlords.
If all this be imagined by English legislators and English writers, they will be better able to understand the Irish land question, and to comprehend the nature of 'Irish difficulties,' as well as the justice of feeble, insincere, and baffled statesmen in casting the blame of Irish misery and disorder on the unruly and barbarous nature of Irishmen.

They will recollect that the aristocracy of Ireland are the high-spirited descendants of conquerors, with the instinct of conquest still in their blood.

The parliament which enacted the Irish land laws was a parliament composed almost exclusively of men of this dominant race.