Church from the secular oppression and imposts of the chiefs. But in the case of England, a settled and agricultural country, the conquest was complete and final; the conquerors formed everywhere a new upper class which, though at first alien and oppressive, became in time a national nobility, and ultimately blended with the subject race. In the case of Ireland, though the Septs were easily defeated by the Norman soldiery, and the formal submission of their chiefs was easily extorted, the conquest was neither complete nor final. In their hills and bogs the wandering Septs easily evaded the Norman arms. The Irish Channel was wide; the road lay through North Wales, long unsubdued, and, even when subdued, mutinous, and presenting natural obstacles to the passage of heavy troops; the centre of Anglo-Norman power was far away in the south-east of England, and the force of the monarchy was either attracted to Continental fields or absorbed by struggles with baronial factions. Richard II., coming to a throne which had been strengthened and exalted by the achievements of his grandfather, seems in one of his moods of fitful ambition to have conceived the design of completing the conquest of Ireland, and he passed over with a great power; but his fate showed that the arm of the monarchy was still too short to reach the dependency without losing hold upon the imperial country. As a rule, the subjugation of Ireland during the period before the Tudors was in effect left to private enterprise, which of course confined its efforts to objects of private gain, and never thought of undertaking the systematic subjugation of native fortresses in the interest of order and civilization. Instead of a national aristocracy the 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