Cromwell’s gentle watchword “To Hell or to Connacht,” therefore, was the logical consummation of that policy. It was the full peal of bells of which the Statutes of Kilkenny were the first brazen intimation. And when he had finished his righteous labours for the Lord God of Hosts the wildest dreamer in the world in his wildest of dreams would not have thought that his work could be undone. But a strange thing happened. Official documents indicate that his work was completely done. The Nation was first decimated--“nits will be lice” was the playful phrase of his soldiers as they caught babes on their pike-heads. Then it was swept west of the Shannon; and thoroughly swept, to judge by the procedure adopted. But within thirty years it is found back upon the land--O’Neills where O’Neill stateships had been, Maguires where Maguire stateships had been, and so forth. The Roll of the Parliament of 1689 as clearly indicates the countries from which the members came from the names they wore as those names would have indicated two centuries before. Historians have therefore thought that, in spite of the effectiveness of Cromwell’s procedure, his work had not been very completely done. But what is more likely is that, with hopes raised by the Restoration, the people began steadily to stream back across the country to the places they knew, where their fathers had lived in free stateships, in order to be ready for any change that might come. There is no record of their journey. There is no place where such a journey could have been recorded. All that is sure is that, whereas Cromwell intended to sweep the Nation west of the Shannon, and adopted a procedure well-drafted to achieve his end, at the end of the century the Nation is found back upon its lands in the very groupings in which it had held them in old times in free possession. The change was that the freemen were a rent-paying tenantry. In other words, there were, as it were, two layers through the country, and each layer represented its own State-idea. The topmost layer was the landlordry, which, being in power, had enforced its own State-idea. When it became, as it finally did, an absentee landlordry, that State-idea did not voice any of the desires, expectations or intuitions of the resident population. In fact, it outraged them at every point. The more truly was this the case when, under the Penal code, the submerged layer of the rent-paying tenantry was denied every right in the existent State. In the words of the Lord Chancellor of that State, “The law” (that is to say, the law of the imported State) “did not suppose any such person to exist as an Irish Catholic.” The two State-ideas were not only mutually contradictory, but they were deliberately kept apart; and there is no indication to show that those who carried in their instincts or memories the old State-idea took any interest in the foreign State except the interest of sufferers.