It has been urged, however--and to those who know the facts, the statement is cruel and shameful mockery--that the Irish landlord would only lose his rented lands, and that 'he could live happily on the demesne land, which he would still retain.' This would be simply impossible in the case of nineteen-twentieths of the class; they would not have the means to keep their demesnes up; they would be compelled to part with them at almost any price; and the few, who would have the means, would, all but certainly, with their beggared fellows, leave a country in which they had been foully betrayed. It is notorious, indeed, that Irish Nationalist leaders, knowing what compulsory purchase means, have marked down the demesnes of the Irish landed gentry as their prey; associates of American Fenians and of the Clan na Gael are to revel in the mansions of the Geraldines, the Butlers, the O'Connors, the O'Neills, as Jacobins revelled in the mansions of the La Tremouilles and the De Noailles. But man does not live by bread alone; the material ruin of the Irish landlord would be bad enough; but the moral consequences of his expropriation must not be left out of sight. Few of the purchasers under the Encumbered Estates Acts care probably much about the lands they have bought; the same remark probably applies to most Irish absentees. But an immense majority of the Irish landed gentry are deeply attached to their hearths and their homes; they are bound to their lands by innumerable ties; they have been brought up with the sentiments which property in land creates; in the pathetic words of an old chronicler, 'They do not wish to pray in foreign churches, or to lie in foreign graves;' their hope has been to live and die amidst their ancestral surroundings. The State has, in a special manner, encouraged this belief; it rooted the Irish landlord in the soil to be its supporter; is it to expel him from the position it has made for him, without a thought of the shock to his best feelings this must produce? Would not such an act be dishonourable, nay, infamous? Let us hear what the deepest of our political thinkers, Burke, has written upon a somewhat parallel case: 'When men are encouraged to go into a certain mode of life by the existing laws, and protected in that mode as in a lawful occupation--when they have accommodated all their ideas, and all their habits to it, ... I am sure it is unjust in legislature, by an arbitrary act, to offer a sudden violence to their minds and their feelings; forcibly to degrade them from their state and condition, and to stigmatise with shame and infamy that character and those customs, which before had been made the measure of their happiness and honour. If to this be added an expulsion from their habitations, and a confiscation of all their goods, I am not sagacious enough to discover how this despotick sport, made of the feelings, consciences, prejudices, and properties of men, can be discriminated from the rankest tyranny.'[146]