It is no wonder that Sir Toby was obliged to add to his report this
assurance: 'There is not a more discontented people in Christendom.'
It is difficult to conceive how any people in Christendom could be
contented, treated as they were, according to this account, which the
officer of the Government did not deny; for surely no people, in any
Christian country, were ever the victims of such flagrant injustice,
inflicted by a Government which promised to relieve them from the
cruel exactions of their barbarous chiefs--a Government, too, solemnly
pledged to protect them in the unmolested enjoyment of their houses
and lands. How little this policy tended to strengthen the Government
appears from a confession made about the same time by the lord deputy
himself. He wrote: 'The hearts of the Irish are against us: we have
only a handful of men in entertainment so ill paid, that everyone is
out of heart, and our resources so discredited, by borrowing and
not repaying, that we cannot take up 1,000 l. in twenty days, if the
safety of the kingdom depended upon it. The Irish are hopeful of the
return of the fugitives, or invasion from foreign parts.'

But the safety of England, do what she might in the way of oppression,
lay then, as it lay often since, and ever will lie, in the tendency
to division, and the instability of the Celtic character. The Rev. Mr.
Meehan, with all his zeal for Irish nationality, admits this failing
of the people with his usual candour. He says: 'These traits, so
peculiar to the Celtic character, have been justly stigmatised by a
friendly and observant Italian (the Nuncio Rinuccini) who, some thirty
years after the period of which we are writing, tells us that the
native Irish were behind the rest of Europe in the knowledge of
those things that tended to their material improvement--indifferent
agriculturists, living from hand to mouth--caring more for the sword
than the plough--good Catholics, though by nature barbarous--and
placing their hopes of deliverance from English rule on foreign
intervention. For this they were constantly straining their eyes
towards France or Spain, and, no matter whence the ally came, were
ever ready to rise in revolt. One virtue, however--intensest love of
country--more or less redeemed these vices, for so they deserve to be
called; but to establish anything like strict military discipline
or organisation among themselves, it must be avowed they had no
aptitude.' This, says Mr. M