When in 1598 the Earl of Essex was sent against him he met him in parley and made him an offer to bear to Elizabeth. Whether that offer was sincerely made, or only put out to save time, does not matter here; but it contained one article that is very significant. It runs thus: “That all nations in Ireland shall enjoy their living as they did two hundred years ago.” Now it is clear that he uses the word “nations” in some special sense--that he is, in fact, rendering some word from Irish. Nor is it difficult to discover what that word is. He can only be referring to the _tuatha_, or stateships, on which the State was based that was now threatened with extinction; and his demand was that they should remain intact and unmolested as they had been “two hundred years ago,” when England was busy with civil war. The demand was rejected. He could hardly have expected anything else. And when he was finally defeated five years afterwards, those “nations,” or stateships, were doomed to a final and terrible ruin. VI. THE RESURRECTION FROM THE DEAD. The horror of the Plantations and Confiscations was not due simply to the land-avarice of a conqueror. In some measure they sprang from that simple and immediate lust, but really they arose from a much remoter necessity. They were logically inevitable from the invader’s point of view. The war of State against State, from that point of view, was always finally helpless because the Irish State, dismembered though it was, took strangers coming into the country and enveloped them in its own polity. And it was indestructible so long as it was based on the free ownership of land. Therefore to destroy the State it was necessary to root it out of the land; and as the State was composed of the people, and could not be composed otherwise, it was necessary to root them out of the land. What happened to them afterwards was but an incident in the campaign. They were to be replaced by a new set of proprietors who would come with the intuitions and desires of the foreign State, and who would be provided with very good reasons to see that the new shire-land with themselves as lords thereof did not revert to stateships in the possession of the people.