prosperity of the country it seeks to dominate, and exceedingly
harmful, though in a degree less easy to gauge, to itself. So it was
with Ireland; and yet it cannot fail to strike any student of history
what an extraordinary resilience she showed again and again under any
transient phase of wise and tolerant government.

Such a phase occurred in the latter part of the reign of Henry VIII.,
when, after the defeat of the Geraldines, for the first time some
semblance of royal authority was established over the whole realm; and
when an effort was also made, not through theft or violence, but by
conciliatory statecraft, to replace the native Brehon system of law and
land tenure by English institutions, and to anglicize the Irish chiefs.
The process stopped abruptly and for ever with the accession of Mary, to
be replaced by the forcible confiscation of Irish land, and the
"planting" of English and Scotch settlers.

Ireland, for four hundred years the only British Colony, is now drawn
into the mighty stream of British colonial expansion. Adventurous and
ambitious Englishmen began to regard her fertile acres as Raleigh
regarded America, and, in point of time, the systematic and State-aided
colonization of Ireland is approximately contemporaneous with that of
America. It is true that until the first years of the sixteenth century
no permanent British settlement had been made in America, while in
Ireland the plantation of King's and Queen's Counties was begun as early
as 1556, and under Elizabeth further vast confiscations were carried out
in Munster within the same century. But from the reign of James I.
onward, the two processes advance _pari passu_. Virginia, first founded
by Raleigh in 1585, is firmly settled in 1607, just before the
confiscation of Ulster and its plantation by 30,000 Scots; and in 1620,
just after that huge measure of expropriation, the Pilgrim Fathers