Excerpt from The History of England, Vol. 4: From the Commencement of the Xixth Century to the Crimean War Ivho, then, were right? Among these many who were wrong, was there no one right? It is surely not to be expected that any one should be wholly right. The proof of the insufficiency of any or all of the above-mentioned theories was not yet extant. The materials for a right judgment were scattered abroad, one per son here and another there obtained a glimpse of true insight; and some declared what they thought and saw. It was a common thing to be told that the land was at the bottom of Fundamental the Irish difficulty; but this might mean, and did mean, difficulty: several different things. It might mean any one of a dozen prev alent vices and faults in the tenure or distribution or cultivation of land, or in the social circumstances which gave land a peculiar value in Ireland. Those who came nearest to the truth, con sciously or unconsciously, were perhaps the lawyers, who told a friend, here and there, in an undertone by the fireside, Insecurity that there was not a title to land in Ireland that would We to land bear looking into; that this was a secret known to all who were concerned in it; that it accounted for the dispute about the value of the existing registry of deeds; the sorest impediment to im provement; the natural cause of the Singular recklessness of Irish landlords; the sufficient explanation of the silence and apparent apathy of mortgagees and others concerned in the enriching of estates, about all methods of improvement and convenience and a powerful instigation to men of various classes to take the law into their own hands, and to nourish those social feuds which might strengthen and protract the local dominion of men whose title to their land was, or might be found, insecure. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.