The Saxon writers lamented their miserable subjection in a monotonous wail for many generations.  So late as the seventeenth century an English author speaks in terms of compassion of the disinherited and despoiled families who had sunk into the condition of artisans, peasants, and paupers.  ‘This,’ says M. Thierry, ’is the last sorrowful glance cast back through the mist of ages on that great event which established in England a race of kings, nobles, and warriors of foreign extraction.  The reader must figure to himself, not a mere change of political rule, not the triumph of one of two competitors, but the intrusion of a nation into the bosom of another people which it came to destroy, and the scattered fragments of which it retained as an integral portion of the new system of society, in the status merely of personal property, or, to use the stronger language of records and deeds, a clothing of the soil.  He must not picture to himself on the one hand the king and despot; on the other simply his subjects, high and low, rich and poor, all inhabiting England, and consequently all English.  He must bear in mind that there were two distinct nations—­the old Anglo-Saxon race and the Norman invaders, dwelling intermingled on the same soil; or, rather, he might contemplate two countries—­the one possessed by the Normans, wealthy and exonerated from public burdens, the other enslaved and oppressed with a land tax—­the former full of spacious mansions, of walled towns, and moated castles—­the latter occupied with thatched cabins, and ancient walls in a state of dilapidation.  This peopled with the happy and the idle, with soldiers, courtiers, knights, and nobles—­that with miserable men condemned to labour as peasants and artisans.  On the one side he beholds luxury and insolence, on the other poverty and envy—­not the envy of the poor at the sight of opulence and men born to opulence, but that malignant envy, although justice be on its side, which the despoiled cannot but entertain on looking upon the spoilers.  Lastly, to complete the picture, these two countries are in some sort interwoven with each other—­they meet at every point, and yet they are more distinct, more completely separated, than if the ocean rolled between them.’

Does not this picture look very like Ireland?  To make it more like, let us imagine that the Norman king had lived in Paris, and kept a viceroy in London—­that the English parliament were subordinate to the French parliament, composed exclusively of Normans, and governed by Norman undertakers for the benefit of the dominant State—­that the whole of the English land was held by ten thousand Norman proprietors, many of them absentees—­that all the offices of the government, in every department, were in the hands of Normans—­that, differing in religion with the English nation, the French, being only a tenth of the population, had got possession of all the national churches and church property, while the poor natives