n who lived
in houses and men who lived in sties, between men who were fed on bread
and men who were fed on potatoes, between men who spoke the noble tongue
of great philosophers and poets and men who, with a perverted pride,
boasted that they could not writhe their mouths into chattering such
a jargon as that in which the Advancement of Learning and the Paradise
Lost were written. [163] Yet it is not unreasonable to believe that, if
the gentle policy which has been described had been steadily followed by
the government, all distinctions would gradually have been effaced, and
that there would now have been no more trace of the hostility which has
been the curse of Ireland than there is of the equally deadly hostility
which once raged between the Saxons and the Normans in England.

Unhappily James, instead of becoming a mediator became the fiercest and
most reckless of partisans. Instead of allaying the animosity of the two
populations, he inflamed it to a height before unknown. He determined
to reverse their relative position, and to put the Protestant colonists
under the feet of the Popish Celts. To be of the established religion,
to be of the English blood, was, in his view, a disqualification
for civil and military employment. He meditated the design of again
confiscating and again portioning out the soil of half the island, and
showed his inclination so clearly that one class was soon agitated by
terrors which he afterwards vainly wished to soothe, and the other by
hopes which he afterwards vainly wished to restrain. But this was the
smallest part of his guilt and madness. He deliberately resolved, not
merely to give to the aboriginal inhabitants of Ireland the entire
possession of their own country, but also to use them as his instruments
for setting up arbitrary government in England. The event was such as
might have been foreseen. The colonists turned to bay with the stubborn
hardihood of their race. The mother country justly regarded their cause
as her own. Then came a desperate struggle for a tremendous stake.
Everything dear to nations was wagered on both sides: nor can we
justly blame either the Irishman or the Englishman for obeying, in that
extremity, the law of self-preservation. The contest was terrible, but
short. The weaker went down. His fate was cruel; and yet for the cruelty
with which he was treated there was, not indeed a defence, but an
excuse: for, though he suffered all that tyranny could inflict