chieftain.  It necessitated war in the shape of a purely local, and indeed personal grapple.  In the second place, plunder.  This was to be secured by raids, incursions, and temporary alliances.  In the third place, escape from the growing power and exactions of the Crown.  This was to be secured geographically by migration to Ireland, and politically by delaying, resolutely if discreetly, the extension in that country of the over-lordship of the King.  Herein lies the explanation of the fact that for three and a half centuries the English penetration into Ireland is a mere chaos of private appetites and egotisms.  The invaders, as we have said, were specialists in war, and in the unification of states through war.  This they had done for England; this they failed to do for Ireland.  The one ingredient which, if dropped into the seething cauldron of her life, must have produced the definite crystallisation of a new nationality, complete in structure and function, was not contributed.  True, the Cymro-Franks proved themselves strong enough in arms to maintain their foothold; if that physical test is enough to establish their racial superiority then let us salute Mr Jack Johnson as Zarathustra, the superman.  But in their one special and characteristic task they failed lamentably.  Instead of conquest and consolidation they gave us mere invasion and disturbance.  The disastrous role played by them has been unfolded by many interpreters of history, by none with a more vivid accuracy than we find in the pages of M. Paul-Dubois: 

“Had Ireland,” he writes, “been left to herself she would, in all human probability, have succeeded, notwithstanding her decadence, in establishing political unity under a military chief.  Had the country been brought into peaceful contact with continental civilisation, it must have advanced along the path of modern progress.  Even if it had been conquered by a powerful nation, it would at least have participated in the progress of the conquering power.  But none of these things happened.  England, whose political and social development had been hastened by the Norman Conquest, desired to extend her influence to Ireland.  ‘She wished,’ as Froude strangely tells us, ’to complete the work of civilisation happily begun by the Danes.’  But in actual fact she only succeeded in trammelling the development of Irish society, and maintaining in the country an appalling condition of decadent stagnation, as the result of three centuries and a half of intermittent invasions, never followed by conquest.”

On the other hand the triumph of Irish culture was easy and absolute.  Ireland, unvisited by the legions and the law of Rome, had evolved a different vision of the life of men in community, or, in other words, a different idea of the State.  Put very briefly the difference lay in this.  The Romans and their inheritors organised for purposes of war and order, the Irish for purposes of culture.  The one laid the emphasis on police, the other on