by none with a more vivid accuracy than we find in the pages of M.
Paul-Dubois:

"Had Ireland," he writes, "been left to herself she would, in all
human probability, have succeeded, notwithstanding her decadence,
in establishing political unity under a military chief. Had the
country been brought into peaceful contact with continental
civilisation, it must have advanced along the path of modern
progress. Even if it had been conquered by a powerful nation, it
would at least have participated in the progress of the conquering
power. But none of these things happened. England, whose political
and social development had been hastened by the Norman Conquest,
desired to extend her influence to Ireland. 'She wished,' as Froude
strangely tells us, 'to complete the work of civilisation happily
begun by the Danes.' But in actual fact she only succeeded in
trammelling the development of Irish society, and maintaining in
the country an appalling condition of decadent stagnation, as the
result of three centuries and a half of intermittent invasions,
never followed by conquest."

On the other hand the triumph of Irish culture was easy and absolute.
Ireland, unvisited by the legions and the law of Rome, had evolved a
different vision of the life of men in community, or, in other words, a
different idea of the State. Put very briefly the difference lay in
this. The Romans and their inheritors organised for purposes of war and
order, the Irish for purposes of culture. The one laid the emphasis on
police, the other on poets. But for a detailed exposition of the
contrast I must send the reader to Mrs Green's "Irish Nationality." In a
world in which right is little more than a secretion of might, in which,
unless a strong man armed keeps house, his enemies enter in, the