Thus the Irish question, which the greatest among the public men of his time had failed to settle, was once more thrown into the cauldron of party strife. XV Looking back on these most melancholy annals, we shall find that for their general sadness Nature is as much to be blamed as man. She did well in placing at the side of a country rich in coal and minerals, destined to be manufacturing, one of pasture to supply food. She made a fatal mistake in peopling them with different and uncongenial races. War, in the age of war, and conquest of the weaker by the stronger were sure to be the result. For the form in which conquest came, the Papacy has partly to answer. It used the sword of the Norman adventurer in this case, as it had in the case of England, to crush religious independence and force all churches to bow to its own dominion, while, as the wails of its own partisans in the Becket controversy show, it was itself unworthy of the sovereignty of Christendom. Of this Catholics are bound to take note, as they are of the fact that the Papacy at a later day, by inciting the Irish to rebellion on its own account, brought upon them no small portion of their woes. The Norman conquest of England had incidentally the bad effect of connecting the English monarchy with dominion in France, and thus turning the forces of the English kings from Ireland, where they might have ended the agony, to a field where they were much worse than wasted. Things could not have taken a more unfortunate course than that of a colony of half-civilized conquerors carrying on war with barbarous tribes of a different race and tongue, yet without force to effect the conquest. The invasion of Edward Bruce, with which England had nothing to do, probably did further harm by breaking up whatever there was of Anglo-Norman order and turning barons into chiefs of Irish Septs. Then the Reformation, a European convulsion involving Ireland, and in the most unfortunate way, since it identified Protestantism with conquest, Catholicism with the struggle for independence, introduced another deadly source of strife, and made Ireland the point of danger to England in her desperate struggle for her own existence and the salvation of the Protestant cause. Otherwise it seems not impossible that the Tudor statesmen, with such a man as Burleigh at their head, might, as they desired, have effected a peaceful settlement. Civilization, not extermination, was their aim. The great Celtic rebellions of Shane O'Neil, Desmond, and Tyrone, the last two Catholic as well as Celtic, forced upon them the policy of extermination with all its horrors. The rising and massacre of 1641 were the sequel. The vengeance of the victor and the transplantation of the vanquished to Connaught were in their turn the sequel of the rising and massacre of 1641. Of these again the rebound was the Catholic rising of 1688, which, had it been successful, would have