Ireland was one of the questions upon which Wolsey and Henry VIII. disagreed. The Cardinal’s policy was to neglect Ireland and save expenses in that direction in order to act as the paymaster and to pose as the arbiter of Europe, with the result that on the eve of his fall, England’s hold on Ireland was said to be weaker than it had been since the conquest. When Wolsey was gone, Henry’s imperialism found vent in Ireland as well as in other spheres, and it was stimulated by the appearance as early as 1528 of Spanish emissaries at the courts of Irish chiefs. But the brutal hatred which later conflicts engendered did not inspire the Irish efforts of Henry VIII. His warfare in Ireland was less ferocious than that which he waged on Scotland, or on the monks of England. If he confiscated the lands of Irish monasteries, he shared the spoils with Irish chiefs, and he also confiscated the lands of habitual absentees; and if he proscribed the Earl of Kildare, he gave earldoms to O’Neill, O’Brien, and MacWilliam. Whatever plans for the expropriation of the Irish clans were propounded to his ears, his own policy was not expropriation, but the conversion of Irish chiefs into Irish peers holding their lands of him as their king; and by the common testimony of English and Irish alike, the land enjoyed greater peace and prosperity at the end of his reign than it had within living memory. The destruction of papal jurisdiction was no grievance to the Irish, for pope after pope had prohibited their preferment and restricted Irish sees to men of English race. Even Edward VI.’s Acts of Uniformity, which were applied to Ireland without the authorisation of its Parliament, evoked no Irish rebellion; and so mild was religious conflict that there was no Irish martyr under Protestant Edward VI. or under Catholic Mary. The permanent schism between the two races was, indeed, due neither to politics nor to religion, but to the expropriation of the Irish from their land. At the middle of the sixteenth century the antagonism between English and Irish was slighter than that between English and Scots, or that between Britons and Boers in 1900. Men can heal the wounds of the conquered, but those of the disinherited fester for ever, unless the race dies out or restitution is made. The Irish are the only white race that the English have evicted in modern times. They ate up the land piecemeal because there was no Irish State to be subdued by political conquest; because their arts of division, which failed against Scottish national feeling, succeeded against Irish septs; because the English conquest of Ireland was, in fact, a barbarian conquest achieved by a more or less civilised race centuries after the normal age of white barbarian conquests had closed. No conquered States pay ransom with the wholesale confiscation of the lands of private individuals; that is a price which is only exacted from the disorganised and the defenceless.