safe retreats from the tribesmen on occasions of despoiling them. Resistance to the same invaders had in England established the monarchy. In Ireland, no political benefit had accrued, as a set-off to the centuries of suffering. At the end of the Danish period, as at its commencement, there was still the pentarchy, and in the separate kingdoms the same low order of political organisation. On the other hand, the presence of the Danes checked the course of social improvement. Indeed, if those writers are correct who take such high ground, as to Irish civilisation in the sixth and seventh centuries, we must hold the Danes to have been a cause of social retrogression. The presence of such an enemy, it can be believed, may have had such an effect.

It is important that the primitive state of the Irish should be understood, because it was preserved almost unchanged till near the beginning, and, in some parts, even till near the end, of the seventeenth century. In the long interval between the landing of the AngloNormans and the final suppression, by James I., of the Brehon law, no organic improvement whatever had taken place. The sept system was still in force, with gavel-kind and tanistry, and all the other impediments which it presented to progress. The political system, such as it was, had crumbled beneath intestine feuds and the pressure of the English enemy: instead of the five provinces of the earlier time, there were ninety "regions" in Ireland-beyond the Pale-under absolutely independent chiefs. If, then, the nation of the tribes has been trained to respect the settled order of government, or laws and institutions of a type higher than its own, this has been effected within comparatively recent times. What the education was which

the Irish received in the earlier and in later times we shall see hereafter.

The Anglo-Normans made their first appearance in Ireland as private adventurers with no title but the sword. Three parties in succession descended on the coast to slay the Irish and Danes alike, and occupy their towns and lands, before the movement was adopted by the King and the character of absolute and confessed lawlessness taken from the expeditions. The earlier adventurers had been prompted to the attack by a native prince, whom a scandalous abduction had embroiled with his countrymen. When Henry II. appeared in Ireland in the year 1172, it was under the authority of the Pope of Rome, the infallible head of the Mother Church of Irishmen.

The primitive Irish Church was Christian, but not Roman Catholic. Though, in 1152, a synod of its clergy acknowledged the See of Rome, no Peter's pence seem to have been paid, and Rome was dissatisfied. In 1154 Pope Adrian IV., as "king of all islands," by a bull granted the lordship of Ireland to Henry, for the express purpose of "broadening the borders. of the Church." As his authority had two years previously been acknowledged in Ireland, his simple object would appear to have been to fill the Church coffers. The interests of Rome jumped with the ambition of the Normans. It was decent, however, that greed and rapine should cloak themselves with an ostensibly noble purpose, and none could be more excellent than the extension of the Faith. Let the Irish take what comfort they can from the fact that the conquest, and its train of evils, had such an origin. If there was a hidden cause, it lay among the motives to the scheme of conquest projected a century earlier, between Hildebrand,

and William the Conqueror; a scheme in which the conquest of Saxon England was to be the prelude to the subjugation, in their turn, of Ireland and Scotland. The hated Saxons had nothing to do with the projection of the scheme. They were its first victims; and if their fall was less calamitous than that of the Irish, it was because they had become, and could fall as, a nation, and were sufficiently advanced readily to blend with, and finally to absorb their conquerors.

Had the Irish been politically united, they must have conquered and expelled the invaders, or been themselves, after a death struggle, finally and quickly vanquished. A monarchy resembles an animal of high organisation. As this may be slain by a single stroke, so that may be overthrown by a single victory. The battle of Hastings gave the supremacy in England to the Normans. A confederation of tribes and clans resembles a creature of low organisation, which being cut in pieces, is rather multiplied than destroyed. When the life-centres are numerous and independent, there can be no killing except through the destruction of the parts. England went down at a blow. Scotland, full of great and independent tribes, again and again repelled, or rather survived, the efforts to conquer it. Every great house was a centre of the popular resistance. Defeated at one point, the people rallied at another; and the process of destruction in detail was too costly and tedious to be persisted in.

No conquest of Ireland could be other than delusive that was not an overthrow of the septs. Society as it stood required to be taken up by the roots and replanted. Whether it would have survived the process may be a question; but if the thing was to be done swiftly and by force, that was the way to do it. To

have slain the whole population, would have been a course infinitely more merciful than that into which the invaders drifted.*

Begun by adventurers, the conquest was, after a brief season, practically left to be carried on by them. The new Lord of Ireland, by the grace of the Pope, after receiving lip homage from a number of native chiefs, executed some Church business in return for the grant he had received, and in a few months left the country to the barons who had preceded, accompanied, or followed him. The conquest was nominal beyond the area which they garrisoned. From the chief province of Ireland even a nominal submission had not been received. There was no pretence made of treating the districts which had submitted as parts or even as dependencies of the empire. Submission brought none of the rights of subjugation; it brought neither the laws, government, nor protection of the conquerors. It brought no obligations. It brought, however, evils which are rarely its concomitants. It gave the barons a locus standi in the country for the purpose of plunder. The Crown depended on the barons for maintaining an appearance of such dominion as it claimed in Ireland, and the only ends which the barons had in view would have been defeated, had the Crown recognised the natives as their fellow-subjects. So the barons had their way. And they just treated the Christian Irish in the twelth century as our Colonists are treating the pagan Maoris in the nineteenth. The plan of the conquest

More than double the number of souls on the island at the date of Henry's invasion, perished by the sword and famine in the war following the rebellion of 1641; and that has been by no means Ireland's most tragic period.

+ How close the parallel is, the reader will see if he takes the trouble to read a paper in "Good Words" for 1866, p. 696, by "An

may have been limited, perhaps undefined. Whatever it was, the strength of England was not free to be applied to its execution. And the drift set in-the drift of events which has led to modern Ireland.

The four centuries which followed were centuries of constant feud and slaughter between the invaded and the invaders, of wrongs and retaliations ever increasing with the lapse of time. They were centuries in which the Anglo-Irish and the Irish were both being brutalised by their conflicts—in which, at least, they were receiving the worst possible training for future peaceable cohabitation. The peoples were in effect all the time enemies, living under different laws and governments. The law of England was "by law" established within the Pale; practically there was no law but the will of the stronger. There were at one time within it nine Counties Palatine -unmitigated despotisms. Beyond these, the rule of a rude aristocracy, unrestrained by the presence of sovereignty, was a virtual anarchy. Outside the Pale were the tribes-their laws, language, and customs all unchanged. There was one main source of the never-ending conflict between the races, namely the land, which the barons were there to take and the Irish to defend. When the barons were united, they held what they took; when they fell out, the septmen regained their own. And the area of the Pale was always broadening or contracting. Sept and tribal wars-wars with the barons-baronial wars, in which the septs took sideswere the stock incidents of the miserable drama. On an

Army Chaplain," on our proceedings in New Zealand. It is the Irish conquest over again, but will terminate, I hope, more satisfactorily. The chaplain is looking forward to the rapid extinction of the natives! How often did the English long for the extinction of the Irish?