Deeper still, however, lay the root of the trouble. The Normans had found England a kingdom ready made, its people accustomed to governance and recognising the reign of law. Coming of a kindred stock, and possessing kindred institutions, the English had only to receive the addition of a feudal system for which their own development had already made them ripe. In Ireland, on the contrary, the new comers found no kindred system. Its tribal polity had placed between its people and themselves a gulf impassable because dividing two wholly different stages of civilization. With no common foundation on which to build, they could only hope to become Irish by cutting themselves off from their own people. If, on the other hand, they wished to substitute law and order for native anarchy, there was no indigenous machinery for the purpose such as the Norman kings had found and used in England: they had no alternative but to introduce the system they had brought with them, a system absolutely irreconcilable with all native ideas of land tenure. Whether Ireland, if left to herself, would even yet have emerged from the tribal stage of society becomes doubtful when we contemplate the persistence of the _mores Hibernici_. A comparison of the changes in our own people between the 12th century and the days of Queen Victoria--or even of Queen Elizabeth--and those discernible in the Irish people suggests relative stagnation. It clings to its ways as the peasant clings to that patch of soil which he will not leave, and on which he can exist only in squalor and in want.[355] Of one thing at least we may be sure. No fonder dream has enthralled a people’s imagination than that of an Irish golden age destroyed by ruthless invaders. The first invaders who entered Ireland did so by the invitation of one of her own sons; and they found it, as an Irishman has said, “a vast human shambles.” Let Erin remember the days of old, Ere her faithless sons betrayed her.