wretched truck system, were reduced to a remarkable degree; hundreds of thousands of the cottar peasantry sank to the lowest depths of indigence. A great social convulsion, in a word, took place; this culminated in famine in several counties; a miserable population was deprived of the means of subsistence. In these circumstances the owners of the soil acted as a class would ordinarily act; many, impoverished themselves, let things drift; many made themselves conspicuous for good works of charity; a minority had recourse to severe measures, like the English landlords of the sixteenth century, to get rid of a mass of poverty clinging in despair to the land. The old divisions of race and faith unquestionably aggravated this state of things; but the Government of the day showed little forethought, and, in fact, was infinitely the most to blame; it met the emergency, not by wise and healing measures, but by legislation, which made the eviction of the peasant from his holding easy and cheap, and by having recourse to repression unjust and severe in the extreme. In too many instances, 'clearances' of estates, an evil word, were witnessed; hundreds of families were driven from their homes and cast on the world; as the necessary result, in numberless cases, the equitable rights of the Irish tenant were ruthlessly destroyed. As a matter of course, Whiteboyism, never completely suppressed, broke out in formidable agrarian disorder; the peasantry, deprived of the protection of law, leagued themselves together to enforce a law of their own; crime multiplied to an immense extent; all the machinery of coercion could not wholly keep it under.[45]