There is no doubt that, if these laws of Kilkenny could have been enforced and carried out, as they were meant to be, the effect hoped for by these legislators might have been the natural result. Yet even much later on, at a period, too, when the English power was considerably increased, under Henry VIII., a very curious discussion of this possibility, which took place at the time, did not by any means promise an easy realization. The following passage of the "State Papers," under the great Tudor, contains a rather sensible view of the subject, and is not so sanguine of the success of the hopes cherished by the attorney-general of James I.: "The lande is very large--by estimation as large as Englande--so that, to enhabit the whole with new inhabiters, the number would be so great that there is no prince christened that commodiously might spare so many subjects to depart out of his regions. . . . But to enterprise the whole extirpation and totall destruction of all the Irishmen of the lande, it would be a marvellous and sumptuous charge and great difficulty, considering both the lack of enhabitors, and the great hardness and misery these Irishmen can endure, both of hunger, colde, and thirst, and evill lodging, more than the inhabitants of any other lande." There were, therefore, evidently difficulties in the way; yet it is certain that the question of the total extirpation of the Irish has been entertained for centuries by a class of English statesmen, and confidently looked for by the English nation. Sir John Davies, as we see, attributes no other object to the Statutes of Kilkenny. But could those statutes be enforced? were they ever enforced? The same writer pretends that they were for "several years;" but the sequel proves that they were not. The reason which he assigns for their execution--that for a certain time after that Parliament there was peace in the island--leads us to believe the contrary; for if, as he himself justly remarks before, the intention of the legislators was to create a perpetual separation and enmity between the two races, the promulgation and strict execution of those statutes would have immediately enkindled a war which could have ended only with the total extirpation of one race or the other. And the further fact that it was thought necessary to reenact those odious laws frequently in subsequent Irish Parliaments proves that they were not carried into execution, since new legislation on the subject was demanded.