With the coming of the Anglo-Normans at the end of the twelfth century the dark shadow begins to fall, and for the first time the Irish Channel assumes its tragic significance.  England, compounded of Britons, Teutons, Danes, Scandinavians, Normans, with the indelible impress of Rome upon the whole, had emerged, under Nature’s mysterious alchemy, a strong State.  Ireland had preserved her Gaelic purity, her tribal organization, her national culture, but at the cost of falling behind in the march of political and military organization.  Sixty miles divided her from the nearest part of the outlying dominions of feudal England, 150 miles from the dynamic centre of English power.  The degree of distance seems to have been calculated with fatal exactitude, in correspondence with the degrees of national vitality in the two countries respectively, to produce for ages to come the worst possible effects on both.  The process was slow.  Ireland was near enough to attract the Anglo-Norman adventurers and colonists, but strong enough and fair enough for three hundred years to transform them into patriots “more Irish than the Irish”; always, however, too near and too weak, even with their aid, to expel the direct representatives of English rule from the foothold they had obtained on her shores, while at the same time too far and too formidable to enable that rule to expand into the complete conquest and subjugation of the realm.

“The English rule,” says Mr. Lecky, “as a living reality, was confined and concentrated within the limits of the Pale.  The hostile power planted in the heart of the nation destroyed all possibility of central government, while it was itself incapable of fulfilling that function.  Like a spear-point embedded in a living body, it inflamed all around it and deranged every vital function.  It prevented the gradual reduction of the island by some native Clovis, which would necessarily have taken place if the Anglo-Normans had not arrived, and instead of that peaceful and almost silent amalgamation of races, customs, laws, and languages, which took place in England, and which is the source of many of the best elements in English life and character, the two nations remained in Ireland for centuries in hostility.”

From this period dates that intense national antipathy felt by the English for the Irish race which has darkened all subsequent history.  It was not originally a temperamental antipathy, or it would be impossible to explain the powerful attraction of Irish character, manners, and laws for the great bulk of the Anglo-Norman colonists.  Nor within Ireland, even after the Reformation, was it a religious antipathy between a Protestant race and a race exclusively and immovably Catholic.  It was in origin a political antipathy between a small official minority, backed by the support of a powerful Mother Country struggling for ascendancy over a large native and naturalized majority, divided itself by tribal feuds, but on the whole united in