Page:The Gaelic State in the Past & Future.djvu/55

 VI.

horror of the Plantations and Confiscations was not due simply to the land-avarice of a conqueror. In some measure they sprang from that simple and immediate lust, but really they arose from a much remoter necessity. They were logically inevitable from the invader's point of view. The war of State against State, from, that point of view, was always finally helpless because the Irish State, dismembered though if was, took strangers coming into the country and enveloped them in its own polity. And it was indestructible so long as it was based on the free ownership of land. Therefore to destroy the State it was necessary to root it out of the land; and as the State was composed of the people, and could not be composed otherwise, it was necessary to root them out of the land. What happened to them afterwards was but an incident in the campaign. They were to be replaced by a new set of proprietors who would come with the intuitions and desires of the foreign State, and who would be provided with very good reasons to see that the new shire-land with themselves as lords thereof did not revert to stateships in the possession of the people.

Cromwell's gentle watchword "To Hell or to Connacht," therefore, was the logical consummation of that policy. It was the full peal of bells of which the Statutes of Kilkenny were the first brazen