But the first efforts to cure an inveterate evil rarely succeed; and Henry VIII., like every other statesman who has undertaken to reform Ireland, was to purchase experience by failure. The report had declared emphatically that the Irish chiefs would never submit so long as they might resist, and escape with their lives; that conciliation would be only interpreted as weakness; and that the tyrannical lords and gentlemen must be coerced into equity by the sword freely used. [Sidenote: The king will not believe it.] The king, however, was young and sanguine; he was unable to accept so hard a conclusion; he could not believe that any body of human beings were so hopelessly inaccessible to the ordinary means of influence as the Irish gentlemen were represented to be. He would first try persuasion, and have recourse to extremity only if persuasion failed. [Sidenote: Lord Surrey is to lecture the chiefs on the principles of government.] His directions to the Earl of Surrey, therefore, were that at the earliest opportunity he should call an assembly of so many of the Irish chiefs as he could induce to come to him, and to discourse to them upon the elementary principles of social order and government. [Sidenote: He is to teach them that realms without justice be but tyrannies.] [Sidenote: He is not, however, to threaten,] [Sidenote: But he is to persuade,] [Sidenote: And they may obey their own laws if they prefer it, if those laws be good and reasonable, so only that they obey some law, and do not live at will.]