of that peaceful
and almost silent amalgamation of races, customs, laws, and languages,
which took place in England, and which is the source of many of the best
elements in English life and character, the two nations remained in
Ireland for centuries in hostility."

From this period dates that intense national antipathy felt by the
English for the Irish race which has darkened all subsequent history. It
was not originally a temperamental antipathy, or it would be impossible
to explain the powerful attraction of Irish character, manners, and laws
for the great bulk of the Anglo-Norman colonists. Nor within Ireland,
even after the Reformation, was it a religious antipathy between a
Protestant race and a race exclusively and immovably Catholic. It was in
origin a political antipathy between a small official minority, backed
by the support of a powerful Mother Country struggling for ascendancy
over a large native and naturalized majority, divided itself by tribal
feuds, but on the whole united in loathing and combating that
ascendancy. Universal experience, as I shall afterwards show, proves
that an enmity so engendered takes a more monstrous and degrading shape
than any other. Religion becomes its pretext. Ignorance makes it easy,
and interest makes it necessary, to represent the native race as savages
outside the pale of law and morals, against whom any violence and
treachery is justifiable. The legend grows and becomes a permanent
political axiom, distorting and abasing the character of those who act
on it and those who, suffering from it, and retaliating against its
consequences, construct their counter-legend of the inherent wickedness
of the dominant race. If left to themselves, white races, of diverse
nationalities, thrown together in one country, eventually coalesce, or
at least learn to live together peaceably. But if an external power too
remote to feel genuine responsibility for the welfare of the
inhabitants, while near enough to exert its military power on them,
takes sides in favour of the minority, and employs them as its permanent
and privileged garrison, the results are fatal to the peace and
prosperity of the country it seeks to dominate, and exceedingly
harmful, though in a degree less easy to gauge, to itself. So it was
with Ireland; and yet it cannot fail to strike any student of history
what an extraordinary resilience she showed again and again under any
transient phase of wise and tolerant governmen