Nature to a great extent fore-ordained the high destiny of the larger island, to at least an equal extent she fore-ordained the sad destiny of the smaller island. Irish history, studied impartially, is a grand lesson in political charity; so clear is it that in these deplorable annals the more important part was played by adverse circumstance, the less important by the malignity of man. That the stronger nation is entitled by the law of force to conquer its weaker neighbour and to govern the conquered in its own interest is a doctrine which civilized morality abhors; but in the days before civilized morality, in the days when the only law was that of natural selection, to which philosophy, by a strange counter-revolution seems now inclined to return, the smaller island was almost sure to be conquered by the possessors of the larger, more especially as the smaller, cut off from the Continent by the larger, lay completely within its grasp. The map, in short, tells us plainly that the destiny of Ireland was subordinated to that of Great Britain. At the same time, the smaller island being of considerable size and the channel of considerable breadth, it was likely that the resistance would be tough and the conquest slow. The unsettled state of Ireland, and the half-nomad condition in which at a comparatively late period its tribes remained, would also help to protract the bitter process of subjugation; and these again were the inevitable results of the rainy climate, which, while it clothed the island with green and made pasture abundant, forbade the cultivation of grain. Ireland and Wales alike appear to have been the scenes of a precocious civilization, merely intellectual and literary in its character, and closely connected with the Church, though including also a bardic element derived from the times before Christianity, the fruits of which were poetry, fantastic law-making, and probably the germs of scholastic theology, combined, in the case of Ireland, with missionary enterprise and such ecclesiastical architecture as the Round Towers. But cities there were none, and it is evident that the native Church with difficulty sustained her higher life amidst the influences and encroachments of surrounding barbarism. The Anglo-Norman conquest of Ireland was a supplement to the Norman conquest of England; and, like the Norman conquest of England, it was a religious as well as a political enterprise. As Hildebrand had commissioned William to bring the national Church of England into complete submission to the See of Rome, so Adrian, by the Bull which is the stumbling-block of Irish Catholics, granted Ireland to Henry upon condition of his reforming, that is, Romanizing, its primitive and schismatic Church. Ecclesiastical intrigue had already been working in the same direction, and had in some measure prepared the way for the conqueror by disposing the heads of the Irish clergy to receive him as the emancipator of the