and that the mechanical problem itself will be greatly eased and
illuminated by their refutation.


II.

Those sixty miles of salt water which we know as the Irish Channel--if
only every Englishman could realize their tremendous significance in
Anglo-Irish history--what an ineffectual barrier "in the long result of
time" 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