In the same way the growth in authority of the high-king was frustrated by external violence. During the Danish invasions the position of the high-king was of great importance as leader and centre of the national resistance, and head of the general assemblies of the country “to bring concord among the men of Ireland.” After these wars, when Ireland came more directly under European influences, efforts were made there, as in other countries, to shape a “kingdom” in the modern sense of a centralised monarchy. Such efforts after unity, which in Ireland, as in every other European country, were in any case slow and difficult, found a determined enemy in England from the time of Ruaidhri O’Conor and Henry II. onwards. In English interests, under the English “Lord of Ireland,” the island was to have no home-born king “coming to Tara,” as the mediæval phrase went, and not even a strong governor of any kind. “A phantom government,” wrote Richey, “planted at Dublin fulfilled none of the duties of a ruler, but by its presence prevented the formation of any other authority or form of rule.” If any leader appeared among the Irish of authority in peace or power in war, the whole force of England was immediately called in to his destruction, and to reestablish confusion and strife. “Ireland were as good as lost,” the English said, “if a wild wyrlinge should be chosen there as king.” It cannot be doubted that the Irish system had sprung from the soul of a people with an intense national consciousness, that it bound the various clans under obedience to one common law, that it gave to all the inhabitants, rich and poor, learned and simple, an enthusiasm for their race and country which rooted that law in their hearts, and endowed it with a tenacity of life that no political misfortune could destroy. The people were inspired by more than material considerations, and through centuries of suffering nothing but death could extinguish their passionate loyalty to their chief and devotion to their race. English governors could never catch the reason or meaning of that patriotism. “It should seem,” said Perrott, the ostentatious proclaimer of English superiority, “that they think, when once they leave their old customs, ... they are out of all frame or good fashion, according to that saying, _They which are born in Hell think there is no Heaven_.” ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ England, however, according to the Unionist teaching, offered a better thing. She “invented” for Ireland a Parliament. What did the Irish make of that? Here we enter on a new range of denunciations—the inadequacy to English ideas and benevolences, not of Iberians and Celts, but of Normans and of English themselves.