that treachery would shrink from
nothing. And to meet it, the English on the spot--all but a few who were
denounced as unpractical sentimentalists for favouring an irreconcilable
foe--could think of no way of enforcing order, except by a wholesale use
of the sword and the gallows. They could find no means of restoring
peace except turning the rich land into a wilderness, and rooting out by
famine those whom the soldier or the hangman had not overtaken. "No
governor shall do any good here," wrote an English observer in 1581,
"except he show himself a Tamerlane."

In a general account, even contemporary, such statements might suggest a
violent suspicion of exaggeration. We possess the means of testing it.
The Irish State Papers of the time contain the ample reports and
letters, from day to day, of the energetic and resolute Englishmen
employed in council or in the field--men of business like Sir William
Pelham, Sir Henry Wallop, Edward Waterhouse, and Geoffrey
Fenton;--daring and brilliant officers, like Sir William Drury, Sir
Nicolas Malby, Sir Warham St. Leger, Sir John Norreys, and John Zouch.
These papers are the basis of Mr. Froude's terrible chapters on the
Desmond rebellion, and their substance in abstract or abridgment is
easily accessible in the printed calendars of the Record Office. They
show that from first to last, in principle and practice, in council and
in act, the Tamerlane system was believed in, and carried out without a
trace of remorse or question as to its morality. "If hell were open, and
all the evil spirits were abroad," writes Walsingham's correspondent
Andrew Trollope, who talked about Tamerlane, "they could never be worse
than these Irish rogues--rather dogs, and worse than dogs, for dogs do
but after their kind, and they degenerate from all humanity." There is
but one way of dealing with wild dogs or wolves; and accordingly the
English chiefs insisted that this was the way to deal with the Irish.
The state of Ireland, writes one, "is like an old cloak often before
patched, wherein is now made so great a gash that all the world doth
know that there is no remedy but to make a new." This means, in the
language of another, "that there is no way to daunt these people but by
the edge of the sword, and to plant better in their place, or rather,
let them cut one another's throats." These were no idle words. Every
page of these papers contains some memorandum of execution and
destruction. The progress