loathing and combating that ascendancy.  Universal experience, as I shall afterwards show, proves that an enmity so engendered takes a more monstrous and degrading shape than any other.  Religion becomes its pretext.  Ignorance makes it easy, and interest makes it necessary, to represent the native race as savages outside the pale of law and morals, against whom any violence and treachery is justifiable.  The legend grows and becomes a permanent political axiom, distorting and abasing the character of those who act on it and those who, suffering from it, and retaliating against its consequences, construct their counter-legend of the inherent wickedness of the dominant race.  If left to themselves, white races, of diverse nationalities, thrown together in one country, eventually coalesce, or at least learn to live together peaceably.  But if an external power too remote to feel genuine responsibility for the welfare of the inhabitants, while near enough to exert its military power on them, takes sides in favour of the minority, and employs them as its permanent and privileged garrison, the results are fatal to the peace and prosperity of the country it seeks to dominate, and exceedingly harmful, though in a degree less easy to gauge, to itself.  So it was with Ireland; and yet it cannot fail to strike any student of history what an extraordinary resilience she showed again and again under any transient phase of wise and tolerant government.

Such a phase occurred in the latter part of the reign of Henry VIII., when, after the defeat of the Geraldines, for the first time some semblance of royal authority was established over the whole realm; and when an effort was also made, not through theft or violence, but by conciliatory statecraft, to replace the native Brehon system of law and land tenure by English institutions, and to anglicize the Irish chiefs.  The process stopped abruptly and for ever with the accession of Mary, to be replaced by the forcible confiscation of Irish land, and the “planting” of English and Scotch settlers.

Ireland, for four hundred years the only British Colony, is now drawn into the mighty stream of British colonial expansion.  Adventurous and ambitious Englishmen began to regard her fertile acres as Raleigh regarded America, and, in point of time, the systematic and State-aided colonization of Ireland is approximately contemporaneous with that of America.  It is true that until the first years of the sixteenth century no permanent British settlement had been made in America, while in Ireland the plantation of King’s and Queen’s Counties was begun as early as 1556, and under Elizabeth further vast confiscations were carried out in Munster within the same century.  But from the reign of James I. onward, the two processes advance pari passu.  Virginia, first founded by Raleigh in 1585, is firmly settled in 1607, just before the confiscation of Ulster and its plantation by 30,000 Scots; and in 1620, just after that huge