THE LAND LEGISLATION AND IRISH SOCIAL LIFE
F EW of the features that distinguish the social life of Ireland in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries did not depend on the elasticity of rent. The social-significance of the land legislation lies in its restraining rent-and with impressive speed and thoroughness: henceforth, agencies other than the landlord's exigence must refashion social life. If, traditionally, the peasant's life was bare and hopeless, the cause lay largely in landlord-tenant relationships which kept farming inefficient and left to the people who worked the soil little more than their subsistence. When the crops, or the animals, that paid the rent tended constantly to encroach on the land that fed the people, it is not surprising that so many of the people ate potatoes and little else-for on no other crop could they live with greater economy of land. The peasant's character, no less than his material condition bore witness to the landlord's exactions. Whether he was portrayed by friend or critic, by novelist or traveller, the Irish peasant, in all probability, was an idle and improvident creature, content with his meagre lot, finding it, indeed, the source of much gaiety and pleasure. When other luxuries eluded him, he revelled the more in laziness: industry, shorn of its fruits, rarely undermined its appeal. In a perverse economy, its victims powerless to check its exactions, it was fecklessness, almost alone, that gave the illusion of independence: when hardship was certain, it was of some relief to pretend one willed it. Paradoxically, the peasant's contentment, too, was bound up with the landlord's exigence: a potato dietary and early marriage, incidental accompaniments of exploitation, were the prerequisites of most of the people's happiness, and the cause of much. Potent sources of discontent were unknown in a community whose members were alike in their poverty and their impotence to end it: unaccustomed to the jingle of money, they had not learned to lament its deficiency: unaware of the comforts of a higher social station, or convinced that such they were, they discovered less in their own lot to resent. Behind most of their more positive pleasures lay their equality in misfortune: they were the more generous