The Framework of Home Rule | Page 9

to colonization and conquest; what an impassable
barrier--through the ignorance and perversity of British
statesmanship--to sympathy and racial fusion!
For eight hundred years after the Christian era her distance from
Europe gave Ireland immunity from external shocks, and freedom to
work out her own destiny. She never, for good or ill, underwent Roman
occupation or Teutonic invasion. She was secure enough to construct
and maintain unimpaired a civilization of her own, warlike, prosperous,
and marvellously rich, for that age, in scholarship and culture. She
produced heroic warriors, peaceful merchants, and gentle scholars and
divines; poets, musicians, craftsmen, architects, theologians. She had a
passion for diffusing knowledge, and for more than a thousand years
sent her missionaries of piety, learning, art, and commerce, far and
wide over Europe. For two hundred years she resisted her first foreign
invaders, the Danes, with desperate tenacity, and seems to have
absorbed into her own civilization and polity those who ultimately
retained a footing on her eastern shores.
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 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