“We must then accept as our point of departure the principle that there is a hierarchy of races and of civilisations, and that we belong to the higher race and civilisation....  The essential legitimation of conquest is precisely this conviction of our own superiority....  Nations which do not hold this belief, because incapable of such sincerity towards themselves, should not attempt to conquer others.”

The late Lord Salisbury was grasping at such a justification when he likened the Irish to Hottentots; it would be a justification of a kind if it chanced to be validated by the facts.  But it does not.  There is so much genuine humour in the comparison that, for my part, I am unable to take offence at it.  I look at the lathe painted to look like iron, and I set over against him Parnell.  That is enough; the lathe is smashed to fragments amid the colossal laughter of the gods.  The truth is that in every shock and conflict of Irish civilisation with English, it is the latter that has given way.  The obscuration of this obvious fact is probably to be ascribed to the military successes of the Norman, or rather the Cymro-Frankish invaders.  If we were the higher race why did we not put them out?  Replying on the same plane of thought we observe that if they were the higher race they would have put us down.  But a more detailed assignment of qualities between the two peoples is possible.  In general it may be said that the two stood on much the same level of mentality, but that they had specialised on different subjects, the Normans on war and politics, the Irish on culture.  Of the many writers who help us to reconstruct the period we ought to signalise one, Mrs A.S.  Green, who to a rare scholarship adds something rarer, the genius of common sense.  This is not the place in which to recall the whole substance of her “Making of Ireland and its Undoing” and her “Irish Nationality”; but from borrowings thence and elsewhere we can piece together a plain tale of that first chapter of the Irish Question.

CHAPTER III

HISTORY

(b) Plain

In those days war was the most lucrative industry open to a young man of breeding, courage, and ability.  Owners of capital regarded it as a sound investment.  What Professor Oman tells us of the Normans in 1066 was equally true of them in 1169: 

“Duke William had undertaken his expedition not as a mere feudal lord of the barons of Normandy but rather as the managing director of a great joint-stock company for the conquest of England, in which not only his own subjects but hundreds of adventurers, poor and rich, from all parts of Western Europe had taken shares.”

The Normans, then, came to Ireland with their eyes on three objects.  In the first place, property.  This was to be secured in the case of each individual adventurer by the overthrow of some individual Irish