The resources Ireland opposed to her invaders have been unequal to the founding of a great state, but have preserved a great tradition.  The weakness of Ireland lay in the absence of a central organization, a state machine that could mobilize the national resources to defend the national life.  That life had to depend for its existence, under the stress of prolonged invasion, on the spontaneous patriotism and courage of individuals.  At times one clan alone, or two clans, maintained the struggle.  Arrayed against them were all the resources of a mighty realm—­shipping, arms, munitions of war, gold, statecraft, a widespread and calculating diplomacy, the prestige of a great Sovereign and a famous Court—­and the Irish clan and its chieftain, by the sheer courage of its members, by their bodily strength and hardihood and feats of daring, for years kept the issue in doubt.

When Hugh O’Neill, leagued with Red Hugh O’Donnell, challenged the might of Elizabeth, he had nothing to rely upon but the stout hearts and arms of the men of Tir-owen and Tir-Conail.  Arms and armaments were far from Ulster.  They could be procured only in Spain or elsewhere on the continent.  English shipping held the sea; the English mint the coinage.  The purse of England, compared to that of the Ulster princes, was inexhaustible.  Yet for nine years the courage, the chivalry, the daring and skill of these northern clansmen, perhaps 20,000 men in all, held all the might of England at bay.  Had the Spanish king at any time during the contest made good his promise to lend effective aid to the Irish princes, O’Neill would have driven Elizabeth from Ireland, and a sovereign State would today be the guardian of the freedom of the western seas for Europe and the world.  It took “the best army in Europe” and a vast treasure, as Sir John Davies asserted, to conquer two Ulster clans three hundred years ago.  The naked valor of the Irishman excelled the armed might of Tudor England; and the struggle that gave the empire of the seas to Britain was won not in the essay of battle, but in the assay of the mint.

It is this aspect of the Irish fight for freedom that dignifies an otherwise lost cause.  Ever defeated, yet undefeated, a long-remembering race believes that these native qualities must in the end prevail.  The battle has been from the first one of manhood against might.  The State Papers, the official record of English rule in Ireland, leave us rarely in doubt.  We read in that record that, where the appeal was to the strength or courage of the opposing men, the Irish had nothing to fear from English arms.

Thus the Earl of Essex, in a despatch to Elizabeth, explained the failure of his great expedition in 1599 against O’Neill and O’Donnell.  “These rebels ... have (though I do unwillingly confess it) better bodies and perfecter use of their arms than those men whom your Majesty sends over.”  The flight of the Earls in 1607 left Ireland leaderless, with nothing but the bodies and hearts of the people to depend on.  In 1613 we read, in the same records, a candid admission that, although the clan system had been destroyed and the great chiefs expropriated, converted, or driven to flight, the people still trusted to their own stout arms and fearless hearts: