One fact thrusts itself upon the attention of any serious student England and Ireland have from the commencement of their ill-starred connection been countries standing on different levels or at different stages of civilization; they have moreover been countries impelled by the force of circumstances towards a different development. Englishmen 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 relation of peoples standing at different stages of civilization and tending towards different courses of development. Here you find the original source of a thousand ills, and hence especially have originated four potent causes of the condition of things which now tries the patience and overtaxes the resources of English statesmanship. First,--The English constitution has both from its form and from its spirit caused in past times, and even at the present day causes as much evil to Ireland as it has conferred, or does confer, benefit upon England.[11]