Professor John Stuart Blackie says:

"Among the many acts of baseness branding the English character in their blundering pretence of governing Ireland, not the least was the practice of confiscating the land, which by real law belonged to the people, and giving it, not to honest resident cultivators, which might have been a polite sort of theft, but to cliques of greedy and grasping oligarchs, who did nothing for the country they had appropriated but suck its blood in the name of land rent, and squander its wealth under the name of fashion and pleasure in London."