But let us translate her triumph into more concrete speech.  The essential lesson of experience, then, is that no device, plan, or policy adopted by England for the subjugation of Ireland has ever been anything except an abject failure.  And the positive of this negative is that every claim that ever formed part of the national programme of Ireland has won its way against all enmities.  No plough to which she ever put her hand has been turned back or stayed eternally in mid-furrow.  It does not matter what period you call to the witness-box; the testimony is uniform and unvarying.  Until Tudor times, as has been noted, there cannot be said to have been in any strict sense an English policy in Ireland; there was only a scuffle of appetites.  In so far as there was a policy it consisted of sporadic murder for the one half, and for the other of an attempt to prevent all intercourse that might lead to amalgamation between the two peoples.  The Statute of Kilkenny—­which is, all things considered, more important than the Kilkenny cats though not so well known in England—­made it a capital offence for a settler to marry an Irishwoman or to adopt the Irish language, law, or costume.  The Act no doubt provided a good many ruffians with legal and even ecclesiastical fig-leaves with which to cover their ruffianism, and promoted among the garrison such laudable objects as rape and assassination.  But as a breakwater between the two races it did not fulfil expectation.  The Statute was passed in 1367:  and two centuries later Henry VIII. was forced to appoint as his Deputy the famous Garrett Fitzgerald whose life was a militant denial of every clause and letter of it.  With the Tudors, after some diplomatic preliminaries, a very clear and business-like policy was developed.  Seeing that the only sort of quiet Irishman known to contemporary science was a dead Irishman, English Deputies and Governors were instructed to pacify Ireland by slaughtering or starving the entire population.  The record of their conscientious effort to obey these instructions may be studied in any writer of the period, or in any historian, say Mr Froude.  For Mr Froude, in his pursuit of the picturesque, was always ready to resort to the most extreme measures; he sometimes even went so far as to tell the truth.  The noblest and ablest English minds lent their aids.  Sir Walter Raleigh and Edmund Spenser were both rather circumambulatory on paper; the work of each is ’a long monotone broken by two or three exquisite immortalities.  But they were both as concise in action as an Elizabethan headsman.  Sir Walter helped Lord Grey, the recognised pattern in those days of the Christian gentleman, to put to death seven hundred prisoners-of-war at Smerwick.  Spenser, being no soldier, leaned rather to famine.  In his famous book he recommends the destruction of crops, houses, cattle, and all necessaries of life so that the Irish should “soon be compelled to devour each other.”  The Commanders-in-Chief