Such were the more striking effects of this pernicious legislation. Its remoter consequences were likewise disastrous. Crime and outrage were promoted by the suppression of national industry. "In the year 1762," says Hely Hutchinson, "a new evil made its appearance, which all the exertions of the Government and of the Legislature have not since been able to eradicate. I mean the risings of the White Boys. They appear in those parts of the kingdom where manufactures are not established, and are a proof of the poverty and want of employment of the lower classes of our people."[112] Then again, this system divorced law from public opinion. Sir Henry Maine has well observed, that social necessities and social opinion are always more or less in advance of law, and that the greater or less happiness of a nation depends on the degree of promptitude with which the gulf between them is narrowed.[113] In Ireland that gulf was deliberately widened; and the people learned, with good reason, to regard the law, not as a protector, but as a plunderer of their rightful gains, and as an agency to make havoc of their industry. "When England," says Mr. Froude, "in defence of her monopolies, thought proper to lay restrictions on the Irish woollen trade, it was foretold that the inevitable result would be an enormous development of smuggling."[114] "The entire nation, high and low, was enlisted in an organised confederacy against the law. Distinctions of creed were obliterated, and resistance to law became a bond of union between Catholic and Protestant, Irish Celt and English colonist."[115] Hely Hutchinson, in a paper laid before Lord Buckinghamshire, in July, 1779, places this matter in a clear light. "You have forced us into an illicit commerce, and our very existence depends now upon it. Ireland has paid Great Britain for eleven years past double the sum that she collects from the whole world in all the trade which Great Britain allows her, a fact not to be paralleled in the history of the world. Whence did the money come? But one answer is possible. It came from the contraband trade, and surely it is madness to suffer an important part of the empire to continue in that condition. You defeat your own objects."[116]