After Limerick
tenure. Unlike the English farmer, he was not a capitalist investing his money in the land. He simply found the land the only thing between him and starvation, and so he would promise any rent. The landlords did nothing to improve the land. The peasants built their own houses, their ditches, and their hedges, and when they had done all this they were liable to be evicted at any moment if the landlord took it into his head to turn his land into pasture. The peasants were half starved and without education, ground down by rackrents, tithes, and their own Church dues, until they had hardly the skin of a potato to subsist on.42 Bishop Berkeley asks in his famous queries, "Whether there be upon earth any Christian or civilised people so beggarly, wretched, and destitute as the common Irish?" All contemporaries were agreed that there was only one answer to this question, but as long as the great majority of the landlords were absentees little could be done. The system of middlemen resulted in the people being screwed to death while the landlord got no more rent. There was no such thing as a poor law in the country, and when people were destitute they died of starvation unless they were supported by private charity. But King tells us that little could be done in Ireland in that way, because
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