[Footnote 1: Vol. i. p.216.]

Many persons have wondered at the success of small bands of English
invaders. Why did not the Irish nation rise _en masse_, and drive them
into the sea? The answer is easy. There was no Irish nation. About
half a million of people were scattered over the island in villages,
divided into tribes generally at war with one another, each chief
ready to accept foreign aid against his adversary--some, perhaps,
hoping thereby to attain supremacy in their clans, and others, who
were pretenders, burning to be avenged of those who had supplanted
them. It was religion that first gave the Irish race a common cause.
In the very year of the English invasion (1171) there were no fewer
than twenty predatory excursions or battles among the Irish chiefs
themselves, exclusive of contests with the invaders. Hence the Pope
said--'_Gens se interimit mutua cæde_.' The Pope was right.

The clergy exerted themselves to the utmost in trying to exorcise the
demon of destruction and to arrest the work of extermination. Not only
the _Bashall Isa_, or 'the staff of Jesus,' but many other relics were
used with the most solemn rites, to impress the people with a sense
of the wickedness of their clan-fights, and to induce them to keep the
peace, but in vain. The King of Connaught once broke a truce entered
into under every possible sanction of this kind, trampling upon all,
that he might get the King of Meath into his clutches. Hence the Rev.
Mr. Kelly is constrained to say--'It is now generally admitted by
Catholic writers that however great the efforts of the Irish clergy to
reform their distracted country in the eleventh and twelfth centuries,
the picture of anarchy drawn by Pope Adrian is hardly overcharged.'
Indeed, some Catholic writers have confessed that the anarchy would
never have been terminated except by foreign conquest establishing a