Of all the lines of division in Great Britain, the most important politically has been that which is least clearly traced by the hand of nature. The natural barriers between England and Scotland were not sufficient to prevent the extension of the Saxon settlements and kingdoms across the border. In the name of the Scotch capital we have a monument of a union before that of 1603. That the Norman Conquest did not include the Saxons of the Scotch Lowlands was due chiefly to the menacing attitude of Danish pretenders, and the other military dangers which led the Conqueror to guard himself on the north by a broad belt of desolation. Edward I., in attempting to extend his feudal supremacy over Scotland, may well have seemed to himself to have been acting in the interest of both nations, for a union would have put an end to border war, and would have delivered the Scotch in the Lowlands from the extremity of feudal oppression, and the rest of the country from a savage anarchy, giving them in place of those curses by far the best government of the time. The resistance came partly from mere barbarism, partly from Norman adventurers, who were no more Scotch than English, whose aims were purely selfish, and who would gladly have accepted Scotland as a vassal kingdom from Edward's hand. But the annexation would no doubt have formidably increased the power of the Crown, not only by extending its dominions, but by removing that which was a support often of aristocratic anarchy in England, but sometimes of rudimentary freedom. Had the whole island fallen under one victorious sceptre, the next wielder of that sceptre, under the name of the great Edward's wittold son, would have been Piers Gaveston. But what no prescience on the part of any one in the time of Edward I. could possibly have foreseen was the inestimable benefit which disunion and even anarchy indirectly conferred on the whole island in the shape of a separate Scotch Reformation. Divines, when they have exhausted their reasonings about the rival forms of Church government, will probably find that the argument which had practically most effect in determining the question was that of the much decried but in his way sagacious James I., "No bishop, no king!" In England the Reformation was semi-Catholic; in Sweden it was Lutheran; but in both countries it was made by the kings, and in both Episcopacy was retained. Where the Reformation was the work of the people, more popular forms of Church government prevailed. In Scotland the monarchy, always weak, was at the time of the Reformation practically in abeyance, and the master of the movement was emphatically a man of the people. As to the nobles, they seem to have thought only of appropriating the Church lands, and to have been willing to leave to the nation the spiritual gratification of settling its own religion. Probably they also felt with regard to the disinherited proprietors of the Church lands that "stone dead had no fellow." The result was a democratic and thoroughly Protestant Church, which drew into itself the highest energies, political as well as religious, of a strong and great-hearted people, and by which Laud and his confederates, when they had apparently overcome resistance in England, were as Milton says, "more robustiously handled." If the Scotch auxiliaries did not win the decisive battle of Marston Moor, they enabled the English Parliamentarians to fight and win it. During the dark days of the Restoration, English resistance to tyranny was strongly supported on the ecclesiastical side by the martyr steadfastness of the Scotch till the joint effort triumphed in the Revolution. It is singular and sad to find Scotland afterwards becoming one vast rotten borough managed in the time of Pitt by Dundas, who paid the borough-mongers by appointments in India, with calamitous consequences to the poor Hindoo. But the intensity of the local evil perhaps lent force to the revulsion, and Scotland has ever since been a distinctly Liberal element in British politics, and seems now likely to lead the way to a complete measure of religious freedom.
Nature to a great extent fore-ordained the high destiny of the larger island, to at least an equal extent she fore-ordained the sad destiny of the smaller island. Irish history, studied impartially, is a grand lesson in political charity; so clear is it that in these deplorable annals the more important part was played by adverse circumstance, the less important by the malignity of man. That the stronger nation is entitled by the law of force to conquer its weaker neighbour and to govern the conquered in its own interest is a doctrine which civilized morality abhors; but in the days before civilized morality, in the days when the only law was that of natural selection, to which philosophy, by a strange counter-revolution seems now inclined to return, the smaller island was almost sure to be conquered by the possessors of the larger, more especially as the smaller, cut off from the Continent by the larger, lay completely within its grasp. The map, in short, tells us plainly that the destiny of Ireland was subordinated to that of Great Britain. At the same time, the smaller island being of considerable size and the channel of considerable breadth, it was likely that the resistance would be tough and the conquest slow. The unsettled state of Ireland, and the half-nomad condition in which at a comparatively late period its tribes remained, would also help to protract the bitter process of subjugation; and these again were the inevitable results of the rainy climate, which, while it clothed the island with green and made pasture abundant, forbade the cultivation of grain. Ireland and Wales alike appear to have been the scenes of a precocious civilization, merely intellectual and literary in its character, and closely connected with the Church, though including also a bardic element derived from the times before Christianity, the fruits of which were poetry, fantastic law-making, and probably the germs of scholastic theology, combined, in the case of Ireland, with missionary enterprise and such ecclesiastical architecture as the Round Towers. But cities there were none, and it is evident that the native Church with difficulty sustained her higher life amidst the influences and encroachments of surrounding barbarism. The Anglo-Norman conquest of Ireland was a supplement to the Norman conquest of England; and, like the Norman conquest of England, it was a religious as well as a political enterprise. As Hildebrand had commissioned William to bring the national Church of England into complete submission to the See of Rome, so Adrian, by the Bull which is the stumbling-block of Irish Catholics, granted Ireland to Henry upon condition of his reforming, that is, Romanizing, its primitive and schismatic Church. Ecclesiastical intrigue had already been working in the same direction, and had in some measure prepared the way for the conqueror by disposing the heads of the Irish clergy to receive him as the emancipator of the Church from the secular oppression and imposts of the chiefs. But in the case of England, a settled and agricultural country, the conquest was complete and final; the conquerors formed everywhere a new upper class which, though at first alien and oppressive, became in time a national nobility, and ultimately blended with the subject race. In the case of Ireland, though the Septs were easily defeated by the Norman soldiery, and the formal submission of their chiefs was easily extorted, the conquest was neither complete nor final. In their hills and bogs the wandering Septs easily evaded the Norman arms. The Irish Channel was wide; the road lay through North Wales, long unsubdued, and, even when subdued, mutinous, and presenting natural obstacles to the passage of heavy troops; the centre of Anglo-Norman power was far away in the south-east of England, and the force of the monarchy was either attracted to Continental fields or absorbed by struggles with baronial factions. Richard II., coming to a throne which had been strengthened and exalted by the achievements of his grandfather, seems in one of his moods of fitful ambition to have conceived the design of completing the conquest of Ireland, and he passed over with a great power; but his fate showed that the arm of the monarchy was still too short to reach the dependency without losing hold upon the imperial country. As a rule, the subjugation of Ireland during the period before the Tudors was in effect left to private enterprise, which of course confined its efforts to objects of private gain, and never thought of undertaking the systematic subjugation of native fortresses in the interest of order and civilization. Instead of a national aristocracy the