Page:History of England (Froude) Vol 3.djvu/417

In Ireland it was observed that the heresy laws were inoperative, because unneeded. In the midst of infinite license of conduct, neither priest nor layman, chieftain nor serf, in that country, indulged himself in liberty of thought. The Roman Catholic religion satisfied the intellectual desires of the Irish nation, which on this one point forgot its besetting inconstancy. Between Scotland and Ireland there was much superficial resemblance. The O'Neils and O'Donnells were indeed of an inferior mettle to the Bruces and the Wallaces. The Milesian Celts never rose into a national consciousness—never in any sense were a people with a cause and a country—until enmity to England was sanctified by religious separation. On the other hand, the feuds of the Scottish chiefs were superseded by their patriotism, whenever the liberty of the nation was imperilled. They were a 'people' in the distinctive sense of the word. They had bought their freedom with the sword; and with the sword they continued to defend it. Yet their independence was an isolated virtue, compatible with unrestrained indulgence in crime and licentiousness: the annals of the sister island are not more rich in aimless feuds, murders, and conspiracies than those of the country which we are describing; and if the Scots had remained as a nation under similar spiritual trammels with the Irish, they would have come down into the modern world equally shrouded in misery—equally the despair of the statesman, the problem of the moralist. But there was a something in all races of the Teutonic blood which rose in rebellion against so barren