of environment. Danger, in proportionate degree, made both classes
brutal and perfidious; but in America, though there were moments of
sharp crisis, as in 1675 on the borders of Massachusetts, the degree was
comparatively small, and through the defeat and extrusion of the Indians
diminished steadily. In Ireland, because complete expulsion and
extermination were impossible, the degree was originally great, and,
long after it had actually disappeared, haunted the imagination and
distorted the policy of the invading nation.

In America there was no land question. Freeholds were plentiful for the
meanest settlers and the title was sound and indisputable. In the
"proprietary" Colonies, it is true, vast tracts of country were
originally vested by royal grants in a single nobleman or a group of
capitalists, just as vast estates were granted in Ireland to peers,
London companies, and syndicates of "undertakers"; but by the nature of
things, the extent of territory, its distance, and the absence of a
white subject race, no agrarian harm resulted in America, and a healthy
system of tenure, almost exclusively freehold, was naturally evolved.

In Ireland the land question was the whole question from the first. If
the natives had been exterminated, or their remnants wholly confined,
as Cromwell planned, to the barren lands of Connaught, all might have
been well for the conquerors. Or if Ireland had been, in Mr.
Chamberlain's phrase, a thousand miles away, all might have come right
under the compulsion of circumstances and the healing influence of time.
That the Celtic race still possessed its strong powers of assimilation
was shown by the almost complete denationalization and absorption of a
large number of Cromwell's soldier-colonists in the south and south-east
under what Mr. Lecky calls the "invincible Catholicism" of the Irish
women. But the Irish were not only numerous, but fatally near the seat