t.

Such a phase occurred in the latter part of the reign of Henry VIII.,
when, after the defeat of the Geraldines, for the first time some
semblance of royal authority was established over the whole realm; and
when an effort was also made, not through theft or violence, but by
conciliatory statecraft, to replace the native Brehon system of law and
land tenure by English institutions, and to anglicize the Irish chiefs.
The process stopped abruptly and for ever with the accession of Mary, to
be replaced by the forcible confiscation of Irish land, and the
"planting" of English and Scotch settlers.

Ireland, for four hundred years the only British Colony, is now drawn
into the mighty stream of British colonial expansion. Adventurous and
ambitious Englishmen began to regard her fertile acres as Raleigh
regarded America, and, in point of time, the systematic and State-aided
colonization of Ireland is approximately contemporaneous with that of
America. It is true that until the first years of the sixteenth century
no permanent British settlement had been made in America, while in
Ireland the plantation of King's and Queen's Counties was begun as early
as 1556, and under Elizabeth further vast confiscations were carried out
in Munster within the same century. But from the reign of James I.
onward, the two processes advance _pari passu_. Virginia, first founded
by Raleigh in 1585, is firmly settled in 1607, just before the
confiscation of Ulster and its plantation by 30,000 Scots; and in 1620,
just after that huge measure of expropriation, the Pilgrim Fathers
landed in New Plymouth. Puritan Massachusetts--with its offshoots,
Connecticut, New Haven and Rhode Island--as well as Catholic Maryland,
were formally established between 1629 and 1638, and Maine in 1639, at a
period when the politically inspired proscription of the Catholic
religion, succeeding the robbery of the soil, was goading the unhappy
Irish to the rebellion of 1641. While that rebellion, with its fierce
excesses and pitiless reprisals, was convulsing Ireland, the united
Colonies of New England banded themselves together for mutual defence.

A few years later Cromwell, aiming, through massacre and rapine, at the
extermination of the Irish race, with the savage watchword "To Hell or
Connaught," planted Ulster, Munster, and Leinster with men of the same
stock, stamp, and ideas as the colonists of New England, and in the
first years of the Restoration Charles II. c