THE SAXON SETTLEMENT OF BRITAIN The colonization of North America, which took place in the full light of history, gives us the means of understanding the Saxon colonization of England, which otherwise lies obscure in the twilight of our written records. In both cases we have to deal with a spontaneous or popular movement. One was across the wide Atlantic, the other across an almost land-locked sea. Both commenced by the formation of a fringe of true settlement wherein inherited tribal traditions and organizations were nursed and strengthened; in both cases the original fringe was fed by a stream of immigrants continuing over several centuries. The chief difference between the two movements lies in this: the American colonists encountered a people who were so physically unlike themselves as to raise a racial frontier, whereas the Saxon people pushed their way into a land inhabited by people of their own stock. The progeny of the captured British native could be reared so as to become a true Saxon. The Saxon colonization, as it spread over the land, engulfed--when it did not exterminate--the natives and their tribal organizations in their agricultural village communities. The Saxon settlement of England held and prospered because it was a true colonization. THE PLANTATION AND COLONIZATION OF IRELAND In Ireland we have an opportunity of contrasting the results of an artificial or forced settlement with those of a natural or spontaneous colonization. Elizabeth, James, and Cromwell settled their colonists on Irish tribal lands, thus exposing them to the full force of the clannish or tribal spirit which then animated the natives of Ireland. The consequence was that the progeny of the British colonists, as it grew up, absorbed the Irish tribal spirit, for this spirit, being more primitive and more easily understood than a sense of nationality, always makes a dominant appeal to the young mind. The blood which English statesmen of the seventeenth century poured into Ireland to quench its national flame only served to feed it. It was otherwise in the north-east of Ireland--particularly in Down and Antrim. These counties were settled in the earlier decades of the seventeenth century by a process of spontaneous colonization. The movement commenced in a small way in 1606 by Hugh Montgomery, a south Scotch laird, purchasing a large tract of the O'Neill's land in county Down. He settled that land with his relations and tenantry--a farming community. Such was the beginning of the colonial fringe on the north-east coast of Ulster. The fringe was fed by a spontaneous exodus of farming folk mainly from the south of Scotland, but the stream was also kept up and maintained from the north of England and from Scottish counties as far north as those of Aberdeen and Inverness. The men who flocked to Ulster found it easier to raise crops on the greensward of Antrim than on the heathery hill-sides of Aberdeenshire.