pathy to the Fairshon is full of historical significance, if we throw out of view the wonderful age of the patriarch,

"You are a plackguard, sir,

It is now six hundred
Coot long years and more

Since my glen was plundered."

Abductions and raids for cattle-lifting were no doubt the chief sources of tribal animosities.

The other social forms were as immature as the political. Property was held in common; the succession of sons to fathers had not been introduced. The tribes had been resolved into clans of different stocks; but the clans had not yet, properly speaking, been resolved into families. The tie of milk was superior to the tie of blood; children belonged rather to the sept than to the family. They were rarely or never reared by their own mothers," the potent men selling," says Sir John Davis, "the meaner sort buying the alterage of their children." These and other customs of the Irish demonstrated a stage of advancement not unlike that of the New Zealanders of our own time. It is true that (though in some districts the primitive pagan religion survived) the Irish had now for some centuries been Christians. That fact, however, has little bearing on the phase of civilisation through which they were passing. Christianity had been run into such social moulds as there were to receive it, pagan superstitions mixing with the doctrines of the Church, and the sept system determining its organisation. It was only on the family system that it could have acted quickly as a transforming power; it did not act quickly on that, so inveterate were the popular habits of lewdness and

licentiousness: on the other hand, it rather favoured the perpetuation of the systems of property and succession.*

The law of succession was a powerful obstacle to political progress. The sept had always a chief, and a tanist, who was to be the chief's successor. When a chief died the tanist became chief, and a new tanist was elected. Any male of full age, belonging to the leading family group, was eligible for the office. The brother of the chief, or the male next to him in age of the same family, was usually chosen ; but frequently the appointment was the occasion of a contest, in which success lay with the most cunning and high-handed. These contests frequently led to feuds, and divided the sept into hostile factions. The law which gave the septmen the power of election was tanistry; the same law regulated the succession to the headship in all the groups, and even to the kingship. It is needless to say that it favoured social disintegration. It divided the sept; it divided the tribe; and it rent the kingdom. The law of property, on the other hand, was a powerful obstacle to industry, and, in particular, to agricultural improvement. The septs were the only landowners: the sept-lands were enjoyed according to the law of gavel-kind, which rendered all the land tenures uncertain. By this law the common was divisible among the family groups, on the principle of relative equality; practically the stronger got the larger shares. When

* In Sir John Davis' time (1613), the Irish were politically less advanced than, and socially not much advanced beyond, the stage in which they were seen by Giraldus Cambrensis. Ultimately, however, their religion improved their morals. While the Welsh still exhibit much of the ancient impurity, the Irish-thanks to the priesthood-are now perhaps the purest people in the world.

death threw lands vacant, the chief, as trustee for the sept, assumed the whole lands, and redivided them-a partition called a gavel. Had the arts of agriculture been known, they could not have been exercised to any great extent under a system which, constantly changing the occupancy of lands, rendered it uncertain whether the labourer would enjoy the fruits of his labour. The consequence was that the people were mainly shepherds or herdsmen.

With such customs and laws, the Irish were in the rear of most of the peoples of Europe. No doubt, in some parts of France and Germany, in Finland, Sweden, and Norway, races were to be found quite as low. But the majority of the European races were almost as far a-head of the Irish, as the Irish of to-day are of the Maoris. The forms which make the real distinctions between nations are organic, hidden as it were under the surface. And European Society generally rested on a framework of a higher type than the Irish,—a superior family and political system, with superior laws of property and succession. Superficially viewed, the races of the Continent may have appeared quite as barbaric; they may have been more lawless and turbulent. Moreover, as these races were mostly pagan, it is easy to understand how, in the sixth and seventh centuries, the Irish, burning with the zeal of recent conversion to Christianity, and possessing some schools of Christian learning, might appear to be in advance of them. Missionaries from Ireland were carrying the new light into the dark places in which paganism was still enshrined. Her music and poetry-products of Keltic genius- -were celebrated. Her sons were distinguished by wit as by piety. All these were distinctions bespeaking a species of superiority. Yet might they have all of them been

presented by a nation of even still lower organisation. The really distinctive marks of inferiority remained; common property, the gavel, tanistry, an imperfect system of kinship. Most of the Europeans had left these behind. Even the Kelts of Britain had got rid of them under their Roman masters, and were separated by a gulf from their congeners of Ireland. At the time of the Roman conquest they were probably lower in the scale. Cæsar found among them customs which throw light on the Irish institutions. But it was their good fortune, for four hundred years, to be under the influence of the most advanced civilisation the world then knew. To this day the Irish have not received an equivalent training. They were long left to work out their own advancement; and, unfortunately for them, Christianity, which for a moment seemed to make them superior to their pagan neighbours, from incidents attending its introduction, did much to stereotype their laws and customs, and to render a spontaneous onward movement next to impossible.

The Brehon or ancient Irish laws had been reduced to a written code, under the immediate authority of St Patrick, or of one or other of the persons who have been rolled up into the saint. They included gavel-kind, tanistry, and the law of the Eric or money compensations for murder. And such was the veneration of the Irish for the instrument of their conversion to Christianity, that they reverenced the code as much as the religion. Patrick's Law, as they loved to call it, was declared to be unalterable; and with that code no people could advance beyond a state of comparative

savageness.

Such was the social and political state of the Irish when their relations with England commenced. The

septmen-rude herdsmen, probably not long settled from nomad life-are represented as living, on the whole, in a miserable condition, borne down by the exactions of their chiefs and kings-"cuttings and cosheries" and "coyne and livery." Beneath them were the Betaghs or slaves, in a condition still more wretched. Above them were the chiefs, exercising lavish hospitalities at the expense of their inferiors; constantly intriguing against and quarrelling with one another. In the palaces of the greater chiefs was maintained no small degree of luxury, and even of barbaric splendour. To these the septmen, at times, repaired to be amused by wandering genealogists, with recently invented fables, setting forth the splendid antiquity of their race, or by wandering minstrels singing to them songs of love or war, or the foray; and at other times, most probably, for justice at the hands of their Brehons or native judges.

The Irish were then, as they have often since proved, their own worst enemies. There were other enemies, however, with whom they had to contend. They might live peaceably, if they would, in the midland, and on the coast to the north and west. But on the south and east were points of terror and danger. These were the towns-almost the only places in Ireland worthy of the name all in possession of the Danes.

The Danes had now been firmly planted for upwards of three hundred years on the land. Had the tribes united, they might have swept the scourges of God into the sea, as afterwards they often might have swept the Anglo-Normans. But they were not united, nor capable of union for more than a moment and a single success. So the scourges remained, finding the coast towns convenient ports of departure on their predatory excursions by sea, and

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