and the Deputies specialised in poison, as became men whose wealth and learning enabled them to keep in touch with the Italian Renaissance.  Bluff, straightforward troopers like Mountjoy, Malby, Wilmot, Bagenal, Chichester, and the rest, not pretending to such refinements, did their best in the way of hanging, stabbing, and burning.  In those days as well as ours the children had their Charter.  “Nits,” said the trustees of civilisation, “will grow to lice.”  And so they tossed them on the points of their swords, thus combining work with play, or fed them on the roast corpses of their relatives, and afterwards strangled them with tresses of their mother’s hair.

I do not recall these facts in order to show that Elizabethan policy was a riot of blackguardism.  That is obvious, and it is irrelevant.  I mention them in order to show that the blackguardism under review was an unrelieved failure.  At one time, indeed, it seemed to have succeeded.

“Ireland, brayed as in a mortar, to use Sir John Davies’ phrase,” writes M. Paul-Dubois, “at last submitted.  In the last years of the century half the population had perished.  Elizabeth reigned over corpses and ashes. Hibernia Pacata—­Ireland is ‘pacified.’”

* * * * *

The blunder discloses itself at a glance.  Only half the population had perished; there were still alive, according to the most probable estimate, quite two hundred thousand Irishmen.  The next generation helps to illustrate not only the indestructibility of Ireland, but her all but miraculous power of recuperation.  So abundant are the resources of his own vitality that, as Dr Moritz Bonn declares, an Irish peasant can live where a continental goat would starve.  And not having read Malthus—­Mr Malthus at that time being even less readable than since—­the Irish remnant proceeded to develop anew into a nation.  In forty years it was marching behind that beau chevalier Owen Roe O’Neill to battle and victory.  O’Neill, a general famous through Europe, the one man who might have measured equal swords with Cromwell, was removed by poison, and then came the massacres.  In eleven years, Sir William Petty assures us, 616,000 out of a total population of 1,466,000 perished by the sword or by starvation.  For the remainder the policy of root and branch extermination was abandoned in favour of a policy of State-aided migration and emigration.  As an alternative to hell the Irish were deported to Connaught or the Barbadoes.  Henceforth there were to be three provinces of loyal English, and one of rebelly Irish.  This again was not a radiant success.  The transformation of the Cromwellian settler has been indicated; if you were to search for him to-day you would probably find him President of the local branch of the United Irish League.  The story repeats itself period after period.  The Penal Laws did not protestantise Ireland.  The eighteenth century may be said to mark the lowest ebb of national life, but the tide