Benjamin Disraeli, Letter to The Times [q.d.]

‘[The Irish] hate our free and fertile isle. They hate our order, our civilisation, our enterprising industry, our sustained courage, our decorous liberty, and our pure religion. The wild, reckless, indolent, uncertain and superstitious race have no sympathy with the English character. Their fair ideal of human felicity is an alteration of clannish brawls and coarse idolatry. Their history describes an unbroken circle of bigotry and blood.’ (Quoted in C. L. Innes, Through The Looking Glass: African and Irish Nationalist Writing, 12; cited in Margaret Greene, UG Diss., UU 2007.)

Further, ‘The Irishman is an imaginative being. He lives on an island in a damp climate, and contiguous to the melancholy ocean. He has no variety of pursuit. There is no nation in the world that leads so monotonous a life as the Irish because their only occupation is the cultivation of the soil before them. These men are discontented because they are not amused.’ (Ibid.?)

See further under J.W. Croker.