Being unable to accomplish this or to put Ireland at {347} the bottom of the sea, where Elizabeth's minister Walsingham often wished that it were, the English had the alternatives of half governing or wholly abandoning their neighbors. The latter course was felt to be too dangerous, but had it been adopted, Ireland might have evolved an adequate government and prosperity of her own. It is true that she was more backward than England, but yet she had a considerable trade and culture. [Sidenote: Irish misery] Certain points, like Dublin and Waterford, had much commerce with the Continent. And yet, as to the nation as a whole, the report of 1515 probably speaks true in saying: "There is no common folk in all this world so little set by, so greatly despised, so feeble, so poor, so greatly trodden under foot, as the king's poor common folk of Ireland." There was no map of the whole of Ireland; the roads were few and poor and the vaguest notions prevailed as to the shape, size and population of the country. The most civilized part was the English Pale around Dublin; the native Irish lived "west of the Barrow and west of the law," and were governed by more than sixty native chiefs. Intermarriage of colonists and natives was forbidden by law. The only way the Tudor government knew of asserting its suzerainty over these septs, correctly described as "the king's Irish enemies," was to raid them at intervals, slaying, robbing and raping as they went. It was after one of these raids in 1580 that the poet Spencer wrote: The people were brought to such wretchedness that any strong heart would have rued the same. Out of every corner of the woods and glens they came, creeping forth upon their hands, for their legs would not bear them. They looked like anatomies of death; they spoke like ghosts crying out of their graves. They did eat the dead carrions, happy where they could find them; yea and one {348} another soon after, inasmuch as the very carcasses they spared not to scrape out of their graves; and if they found a plot of watercresses or shamrocks, there they thronged as to a feast for a time.