Can you be surprised that the Irish looked on English adventurers as little better than robbers, and treated them as such?
If the English Government had made just and equitable land laws for Ireland at or immediately after the Union, all the miseries which have occurred since then might have been prevented.
Unfortunately, the men who had to legislate for Ireland are interested in the maintenance of the unjust system; and there is an old proverb, as true as it is old, about the blindness of those who do not wish to see.
Irish landlords, or at least a considerable number of Irish landlords, are quite willing to admit that the existence of the Established Church is a grievance.

Irish Protestant clergymen, who are not possessed by an anti-Popery crochet--and, thank God, there are few afflicted with that unfortunate disease now--are quite free to admit that it is a grievance for a tenant to be subject to ejection by his landlord, _even if he pays his rent punctually_.
I believe the majority of Englishmen have not the faintest idea of the way in which the Irish tenant is oppressed, _not by individuals_, for there are many landlords in Ireland devoted to their tenantry, but by a system.

There are, however, it cannot be denied, cases of individual oppression, which, if they occurred in any part of Great Britain, and were publicly known, would raise a storm, from the Land's End to John o' Groat's House, that would take something more than revolvers to settle.
As one of the great objects of studying the history of our own country, is to enable us to understand and to enact such regulations as shall be best suited to the genius of each race and their peculiar circumstances, I believe it to be my duty as an historian, on however humble a scale, not only to show how our present history is affected by the past, but also to give you such a knowledge of our present history as may enable you to judge how much the country is still suffering from _present grievances_, occasioned by past maladministration.

Englishmen are quite aware that thousands of Irishmen leave their homes every year for a foreign country; but they have little idea of the cause of this emigration.

Englishmen are quite aware that from time to time insurrections break out in Ireland, which seem to them very absurd, if not very wicked; but they do not know how much grave cause there is for discontent in Ireland.