Brute force indeed wherever lodged, as we are too feelingly taught at present, must be measured and met--measured with care, in order to be met with fortitude.
The chief proximate causes of Irish misery and ignorance are Papacy--of which I have said so much--and the tenure and management of landed property, and both these have a common origin, viz.

the imperfect conquest of the country.

The countries subjected by the ancient Romans, and those that in the middle ages were subdued by the Northern tribes, afford striking instances of the several ways in which nations may be improved by foreign conquest.

The Romans by their superiority in arts and arms, and, in the earlier period of their history, in virtues also, may seem to have established a moral right to force their institutions upon other nations, whether under a process of decline or emerging from barbarism; and this they effected, we all know, not by overrunning countries as Eastern conquerors have done, and Bonaparte in our own days, but by completing a regular subjugation, with military roads and garrisons, which became centres of civilisation for the surrounding district.

Nor am I afraid to add, though the fact might be caught at as bearing against the general scope of my argument, that both conquerors and conquered owed much to the participation of civil rights which the Romans liberally communicated.