Bluff, straightforward troopers like Mountjoy, Malby, Wilmot, Bagenal,
Chichester, and the rest, not pretending to such refinements, did their
best in the way of hanging, stabbing, and burning. In those days as well
as ours the children had their Charter. "Nits," said the trustees of
civilisation, "will grow to lice." And so they tossed them on the points
of their swords, thus combining work with play, or fed them on the roast
corpses of their relatives, and afterwards strangled them with tresses
of their mother's hair.

I do not recall these facts in order to show that Elizabethan policy was
a riot of blackguardism. That is obvious, and it is irrelevant. I
mention them in order to show that the blackguardism under review was an
unrelieved failure. At one time, indeed, it seemed to have succeeded.

"Ireland, brayed as in a mortar, to use Sir John Davies' phrase," writes
M. Paul-Dubois, "at last submitted. In the last years of the century
half the population had perished. Elizabeth reigned over corpses and
ashes. _Hibernia Pacata_--Ireland is 'pacified.'"

* * * * *

The blunder discloses itself at a glance. Only half the population had
perished; there were still alive, according to the most probable
estimate, quite two hundred thousand Irishmen. The next generation helps
to illustrate not only the indestructibility of Ireland, but her all but
miraculous power of recuperation. So abundant are the resources of his
own vitality that, as Dr Moritz Bonn declares, an Irish peasant can live
where a continental goat would starve. And not having read Malthus--Mr
Malthus at that time being even less readable than since--the Irish
remnant proceeded to develop anew into a nation. In forty years it was