Lectures and Essays. Smith Goldwin
result was a military colony or Pale, between the inhabitants of which and the natives raged a perpetual border war, as savage as that between the settlers at the Cape and the Kaffirs, or that between the American frontierman and the Red Indian. The religious quarrel was and has always been secondary in importance to the struggle of the races for the land. In the period following the conquest it was the Pale that was distinctively Romanist; but when at the Reformation the Pale became Protestant the natives, from antagonism of race, became more intensely Catholic, and were drawn into the league of Catholic powers on the Continent, in which they suffered the usual fate of the dwarf who goes to battle with the giant. By the strong monarchy of the Tudors the conquest of Ireland was completed with circumstances of cruelty sufficient to plant undying hatred in the breasts of the people. But the struggle for the land did not end there, instead of the form of conquest it took that of confiscation, and was waged by the intruder with the arms of legal chicane. In the form of eviction it has lasted to the present hour; and eviction in Ireland is not like eviction in England, where great manufacturing cities receive and employ the evicted; it is starvation or exile. Into exile the Irish people have gone by millions, and thus, though neither maritime nor by nature colonists, they have had a great share in the peopling of the New World. The cities and railroads of the United States are to a great extent the monuments of their labour. In the political sphere they have retained the weakness produced by ages of political serfage, and are still the debris of broken clans, with little about them of the genuine republican, apt blindly to follow the leader who stands to them as a chief, while they are instinctively hostile to law and government as their immemorial oppressors in their native land. British statesmen, when they had conceded Catholic emancipation and afterwards Disestablishment, may have fancied that they had removed the root of the evil. But the real root was not touched till Parliament took up the question of the land, and effected a compromise which may perhaps have to be again revised before complete pacification is attained.
In another way geography has exercised a sinister influence on the fortunes of Ireland. Closely approaching Scotland, the northern coast of Ireland in course of time invited Scotch immigration, which formed as it were a Presbyterian Pale. If the antagonism between the English Episcopalian and the Irish Catholic was strong, that between the Scotch Presbyterian and the Irish Catholic was stronger. To the English Episcopalian the Irish Catholic was a barbarian and a Romanist; to the Scotch Presbyterian he was a Canaanite and an idolater. Nothing in history is more hideous than the conflict in the north of Ireland in the time of Charles I. This is the feud which has been tenacious enough of its evil life to propagate itself even in the New World, and to renew in the streets of Canadian cities the brutal and scandalous conflicts which disgrace Belfast. On the other hand, through the Scotch colony, the larger island has a second hold upon the smaller. Of all political projects a federal union of England and Ireland with separate Parliaments under the same Crown seems the most hopeless, at least if government is to remain parliamentary; it may be safely said that the normal relation between the two Parliaments would be collision, and collision on a question of peace or war would be disruption. But an independent Ireland might be a feasible as well as natural object of Irish aspiration if it were not for the strength, moral as well as numerical, of the two intrusive elements. How could the Catholic majority be restrained from legislation which the Protestant minority would deem oppressive? And how could the Protestant minority, being as it is more English or Scotch than Irish, be restrained from stretching its hands to England or Scotland for aid? It is true that if scepticism continues to advance at its present rate, the lines of religious separation may be obliterated or become too faint to exercise a great practical influence, and the bond of the soil may then prevail. But the feeling against England which is the strength of Irish Nationalism is likely to subside at the same time.
Speculation on unfulfilled contingencies is not invariably barren. It is interesting at all events to consider what would have been the consequences to the people of the two islands, and humanity generally, if a Saxon England and a Celtic Ireland had been allowed to grow up and develop by the side of each other untouched by Norman conquest. In the case of Ireland we should have been spared centuries of oppression which has profoundly reacted, as oppression always does, on the character of the oppressor; and it is difficult to believe that the Isle of Saints and of primitive Universities would not have produced some good fruits of its own. In the Norman conquest of England historical optimism sees a great political and intellectual blessing beneath the disguise of barbarous havoc and alien tyranny. The Conquest was the continuation of the process of migratory invasions by which the nations of modern Europe were founded, from restless ambition and cupidity, when it had ceased to be beneficent. It was not the superposition of one primitive element of population on another, to the ultimate advantage, possibly, of the compound; but the destruction of a nationality, the nationality of Alfred and Harold, of Bede and AElfric. The French were superior in military organization; that they had superior gifts of any kind, or that their promise was higher than that of the native English, it would not be easy to prove. The language, we are told, is enriched by the intrusion of the French element. If it was enriched it was shattered; and the result is a mixture so heterogeneous as to be hardly available for the purposes of exact thought, while the language of science is borrowed from the Greek, and as regards the unlearned mass of the people is hardly a medium of thought at all. There are great calamity in history, though their effects may in time be worked off, and they may be attended by some incidental good. Perhaps the greatest calamity in history were the wars of Napoleon, in which some incidental good may nevertheless be found.
To the influences of geographical position, soil, and race is to be added, to complete the account of the physical heritage, the influence of climate. But in the case of the British Islands we must speak not of climate, but of climates, for within the compass of one small realm are climates moist and comparatively dry, warm and cold, bracing and enervating, the results of special influences the range of which is limited. Civilized man to a great extent makes a climate for himself; his life in the North is spent mainly indoors, where artificial heat replaces the sun. The idea which still haunts us, that formidable vigour and aptitude for conquest are the appanage of Northern races, is a survival from the state in which the rigour of nature selected and hardened the destined conquerors of the Roman Empire. The stoves of St. Petersburg are as enervating as the sun of Naples, and in the struggle between the Northern and Southern States of America not the least vigorous soldiers were those who came from Louisiana. In the barbarous state the action of a Northern climate as a force of natural selection must be tremendous. Of the races which peopled the British Islands the most important had already undergone that action in their original abodes. They would, however, still feel the beneficent influence of a climate on the whole eminently favourable to health and to activity; bracing, yet not so rigorous as to kill those tender plants of humanity which often bear in them the most precious germs of civilization, neither confining the inhabitant too much to the shelter of his dwelling, nor, as the suns of the South are apt to do, drawing him too much from home. The climate and the soil together formed a good school for the character of the young nation, as they exacted the toil of the husbandman and rewarded it. Of the varieties of temperature and weather within the island the national character still bears the impress, though in a degree always decreasing as the assimilating agencies of civilization make their way. Irrespectively of the influence of special employments, and perhaps even of peculiarity of race, mental vigour, independence, and reasoning power are always ascribed to the people of the North. Variety, in this as in other respects, would naturally produce a balance of tendencies in the nation conductive to moderation and evenness of progress.
The islands are now the centre of an Empire which to some minds seems more important than the islands themselves. An empire it is called, but the name is really applicable only to India. The relation of England to her free colonies is not in the proper sense of the term imperial, while her relation to such dependencies as Gibraltar and Malta is military alone. Colonization is the natural and entirely beneficent result of general causes, obvious enough and already mentioned, including that power of self-government, fostered by the circumstances of the colonizing country, which made the character and destiny of New England so different from those of New France.
Equally natural was the choice of the situation for the original colonies on the shore of the New World. The foundation of the Australian Colonies, on the other hand, was determined by political accident, compensation for the loss of the American Colonies being