ABSTRACT
The English, having even in the worst of the problems of the industrial revolution no other cause for conflict than a division of class and of interests, were little able to enter into the difficulties of a people divided bitterly by race, religion, and history. A severe critic of the English treatment of Ireland, Gustave de Beaumont, writing in 1839, gave a terrible picture of the Irish peasant. Michael Davitt, moving among English workmen, knew that the ordinary Englishman was horrified by the Irish outrages. The crimes behind the successes of the Rhodesian empire makers were known to few but the crimes of the Irish agrarian war were known in every village in England. The causes of Irish cruelty are plain enough to anybody who studies Irish history. Some Irishmen hated England from their knowledge of distant history, history as ancient as to be mixed and there with legend.
