himself on the one hand the king and despot; on the other simply his
subjects, high and low, rich and poor, all inhabiting England, and
consequently all English. He must bear in mind that there were two
distinct nations--the old Anglo-Saxon race and the Norman invaders,
dwelling intermingled on the same soil; or, rather, he might
contemplate two countries--the one possessed by the Normans, wealthy
and exonerated from public burdens, the other enslaved and oppressed
with a land tax--the former full of spacious mansions, of walled
towns, and moated castles--the latter occupied with thatched cabins,
and ancient walls in a state of dilapidation. This peopled with
the happy and the idle, with soldiers, courtiers, knights, and
nobles--that with miserable men condemned to labour as peasants and
artisans. On the one side he beholds luxury and insolence, on the
other poverty and envy--not the envy of the poor at the sight of
opulence and men born to opulence, but that malignant envy, although
justice be on its side, which the despoiled cannot but entertain on
looking upon the spoilers. Lastly, to complete the picture, these two
countries are in some sort interwoven with each other--they meet
at every point, and yet they are more distinct, more completely
separated, than if the ocean rolled between them.'

Does not this picture look very like Ireland? To make it more like,
let us imagine that the Norman king had lived in Paris, and kept a
viceroy in London--that the English parliament were subordinate to the
French parliament, composed exclusively of Normans, and governed by
Norman undertakers for the benefit of the dominant State--that the
whole of the English land was held by ten thousand Norman proprietors,
many of them absentees--that all the offices of the government, in
every department, were in the hands of Normans--that, differing in
religion with the English nation, the French, being only a tenth of