country; but in neither has there been colonisation, and the land has remained to a great extent in possession of the native race.
The result is that, though in both there is a healthy national feeling, in neither can we discern any real hostility to England.
The two counties of Ireland which are most thoroughly British are Antrim and Down, where colonisation was founded, not on force or confiscation so much as on peaceful penetration.[1]
Had a process of assimilation and peaceful penetration, such as Henry VIII. seems to have planned, gone on over the whole island, what might not have been the result? Irish unruliness, English religious innovations impeded this scheme, and led, as if inevitably, first to confiscation, and then to colonisation.
Experience has shown that the landed interest of a country, if not vexed in matters of conscience or in pocket, tends almost always to become the firmest support of the existing form of government. There seems no reason to believe that the spirit of loyalty to the person of the monarch which we find so marked among the Catholic nobles and gentry under the Stuarts would not have grown, and spread downward among the people, if unhampered by the constant vexatious interference of the State with both the conscience and the estates of all Catholics, until it finally became a feeling of attachment to existing institutions.
- ↑ For which, however, a way was paved by Chichester's massacres.
