There is one other point to which Mr. Froude's attention ought to be called, as likely seriously to diminish the political weight of his exposition of the causes of Irish discontent. The sole justification of a conquest, even of a conquest achieved over barbarians by a civilized people, is that it supplies good government--that is, protection for life and property. Unless it does this, no picture, however dark, of the discords and disorder and savagery of the conquered can set the conqueror right at the bar of civilized opinion. Therefore, the shocking and carefully darkened pictures of the social and political degradation of the native Irish in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries with which Mr. Froude is furnishing us, are available for English vindication only on the supposition that the invasion, even if it destroyed liberty, brought with it law and order. But according to Mr. Froude's eloquent confession, it brought nothing of the kind.
Queen Elizabeth made the first serious attempt to subjugate Ireland, but she did it, Mr. Froude tells us, with only a handful of English soldiers--who acted as auxiliaries to Irish clans engaged on the queen's instigation in mutual massacre. After three years of this sort of thing, the whole southern portion of the island was reduced, to use Mr. Froude's words, "to a smoking wilderness," men, women, and children having been remorselessly slaughtered; but no attempt whatever was then made to establish either courts or police, or any civil rule of any kind. Society was left in a worse condition than before. Why was this? Because, says Mr. Froude, the English Constitution made no provision for the maintenance of a standing army for any such purpose.
The second attempt was made by Cromwell. He slaughtered the garrisons of Drogheda and Wexford, and scattered the armies of the various Irish factions, but he made no more attempt to police the island than Elizabeth. The only mode of establishing order resorted to by the Commonwealth was the wholesale confiscation of the land, and its distribution among the officers and soldiers of the army, the natives of all ages and sexes being driven into Connaught. The "policing" was then left to be done by the new settlers, each man with the strong hand, on his own account. The third attempt was made by William III., who also followed the Cromwellian plan, and left the island to be governed during the following century by the military adventurers who had entered into possession of the soil.