was not enough to bar the effective exercise of overmastering power.  And power was exercised, at first from without, to support the Pale, to enlarge it, to make it include Ireland.  When this had been done, power began, in the seventeenth century, to be exercised from within Ireland, within the precinct of its government and its institutions.  These were carefully corrupted, from the multiplication of the Boroughs by James I. onwards, for the purpose.  The struggle became civil, instead of martial; and it was mainly waged by agencies on the spot, not from beyond the Channel.  When the rule of England passed over from the old violence into legal forms and doctrines, the Irish reaction against it followed the example.  And the legal idea of Irish nationality took its rise in very humble surroundings; if the expression may be allowed, it was born in the slums of politics.  Ireland reached the nadir of political depression when, at and after the Boyne, she had been conquered not merely by an English force, but by continental mercenaries.  The ascendant Protestantism of the island had never stood so low in the aspect it presented to this country; inasmuch as the Irish Parliament, for the first time, I believe, declared itself dependent upon England,[76] and either did not desire, or did not dare, to support its champion Molyneux, when his work asserting Irish independence was burned in London.  It petitioned for representation in the English Parliament, not in order to uplift the Irish people, but in order to keep them down.  In its sympathies and in its aims the overwhelming mass of the population had no share.  It was Swift who, by the Drapier’s Letters, for the first time called into existence a public opinion flowing from and representing Ireland as a whole.  He reasserted the doctrine of Molyneux, and denounced Wood’s halfpence not only as a foul robbery, but as a constitutional and as a national insult.  The patience of the Irish Protestants was tried very hard, and they were forced, as Sir Charles Duffy states in his vivid book, to purchase the power of oppressing their Roman Catholic fellow-countrymen at a great price.[77] Their pension list was made to provide the grants too degrading to be tolerated in England.  The Presbyterians had to sit down under the Episcopal monopoly; but the enjoyment of that monopoly was not left to the Irish Episcopalians.  In the time of Henry VIII. it had been necessary to import an English Archbishop Browne[78] and an English Bishop Bale, or there might not have been a single Protestant in Ireland.  It was well to enrich the rolls of the Church of Ireland with the piety and learning of Ussher, and to give her in Bedell one name, at least, which carries the double crown of the hero and the saint.  But, after the Restoration, by degrees the practice degenerated, and Englishmen were appointed in numbers to the Irish Episcopate in order to fortify and develop by numerical force what came to be familiarly known as the English interest.