Page:American Historical Review, Volume 12.djvu/134

 124 Reviews oj Books lish life — its feudal dues, three-field system of agriculture, the common law — along with English dress and speech. In many other ways it was so deeply modified by the presence of the Irish — the clan-system, Brehon law, military dependents of English and Irish landholders quartered on the free and servile inhabitants, both English and Irish, that the appear- ance is not of a transplanted England, but of a merely modified native community. On the whole, for its first century and a half the English colony in Ireland might be considered a successful experiment. It was felf-supporting and tended to extension and consolidation. Later things lid not go on so well. The campaigns of Edward Bruce in 1315 ravaged '.e land and broke the prestige of English administration ; some English olonists left the island and others changed a farming for a hired ■oldier's life; the Celtic tide flowed in correspondingly, not only in iiiaterial ways but in speech, dress, law and customs. The old Celtic . hieftains rose in power and many English became indistinguishable from those of purely Celtic blood. By 1500 the first English colony nay be considered to have almost disappeared, and Ireland to have •lipped practically out of the hands of England and out of the domain ■>: English institutions. Some of the most persistent problems of Irish history, however, go l-ack to this period. The discord between permanent English settlers rind temporary officials and adventurers, the uncertainty of the status of the Irish parliament as compared with the English; the contrast between the law, with its prohibition of intercourse between English and Irish, its refusal to recognize Irish land-titles and customs, and its blind ad- herence to English conceptions, and the actual facts of life, with the ubiquity of Irish blood, customs and ideals — these things not only have their roots in the earlier period but are already full-grown with the first century of the conquest. With the strong government of the Tudors came a process of. re- action consisting in the gradual destruction of the power of the Irish chieftains, the dissolution of the clans, and the partial rehabilitation of the colony. Lapping over these processes, and vastly more significant than they, beginning about 1550 but attaining its full activity only in the reign of James I., came the second great process of colonization. The incentives to this, its methods, its difficulties, its partial success and its essential failure occupy the third book ; as the third colonization, that under the Commonwealth, does the fourth, and the rule of the colonists in Ireland since that time does the fifth and concluding book. Dr. Bonn looks upon the history of the English colonization of Ireland as a pro- found and melancholy failure. The effort to colonize a coimtry already occupied by a self-supporting race was at best a difficult experiment but it was made impracticable and calamitous to both peoples by certain prevailing errors on the part of the colonizing race. Dr. Bonn's work is in essence a study and analysis of all the steps in this process. We should be glad if the author had given somewhat more narrative