The seas were full of pirate ships, ready to impose blackmail on the merchants at sea and on land, and the Irish ports were open to attack from Scotland and Wales. The mediæval king derived large part of his revenues from port dues, and for him it was a necessity as an island sovereign to keep open the ports of entry and to control the flow of commerce. Until he had had time to reduce the natives to his obedience, their exclusion from his gateways into the country, which enabled him to put force on the chiefs who were outside his authority, was a necessity.

But when that condition of affairs had disappeared, when an enlarged commerce with other nations had succeeded to the isolation of a time when the use of the land was largely pastoral and when trade was limited to those things only which could not be produced at home; when Ireland came to export large quantities of food to feed the English armies in France and the greater island, the same policy on the part of the English kings continued against the native Irish beyond their feudal jurisdiction. As far as possible they were excluded from any use of the sea.

No attempt was made, no attempt ever has been made, to reconcile the Irish of the communal society to the AngloScottish ideals by encouraging them to take part in the greatest solvent power on social life-external trade. As the commercial rivalry became more pronounced among the nations of Europe, and the field of eastern and finally of western enterprise enlarged the scope of endeavour, the intolerance of the English State and of the English traders of any competition from Ireland and Scotland became increasingly prominent. This is the Irish question.

With Scotland the conditions differed. Up to 1715 it was a hostile, a foreign rival. Not separated by the sea, the Scots, since their expedition to Darien, have by the Union been enabled to take advantage of British opportunities. But Ireland, from the twelfth century an integral part of the British dominions, has never been permitted to share in British prosperity. Just as in this year of 1917 the contract entered into on behalf of Great Britain and Ireland by which the Cunard steamships called at Queenstown has been re

scinded without any consent of Ireland, so it was in the past. When, in the time of the Cromwellian plantation of Connaught, the town of Galway, together with other Irish seaports, was offered for sale to satisfy debts due from the Cromwellian government to the merchants of Liverpool and Gloucester, it was advertised that no town or port in the three nations, London excepted, was more considerable. It had many noble uniform buildings of marble; it lay open for trade (it lies so still) with Spain, with the Straits, with the West Indies. It had at the time an Irish population.

But the long history of the systematic suppression and destruction of every form of industry, which the Irish have undertaken, cannot be told here. Perhaps a Channel Tunnel might solve the question, tempting English and Scottish capital to invest in the glorious harbours of the south and west, in rivalry to Belfast and Liverpool.

Intermarriage and Fosterage.-One other solvent of society, perhaps as it affects population the strongest, by which two social ideals might have been fused, was intermarriage.

Strong in their social system, the Irish welcomed and courted intermarriage with the stranger. The Anglo-Irish who intermarried with them were willing to do so, as they obtained thereby an accession of fighting force, which enabled them to set at defiance the power of the king's deputy and to evade payment of feudal dues. As chiefs controlling great territory, occupying large tracts tilled by the natives, and participating in the communal contributions, they were in a far easier condition than as isolated posts of a hostile garrison, which could only expect half-hearted support from the king's deputy, and perpetual raids and blackmail from the Irish. Free intermarriage between the two might have gone a long way towards a welding together of the two social systems, then both in a state of transition and decay.

But just as the Irish accepted the admission of strangers who were good fighting men to their community, men who straightway left feudal customs and became Irish, the English and the Anglo-Scot, with an instinct of self-preservation, used all powers of force, politics, and religion to prevent the passing over from their feudal system of landholding and inheritance

of those who ought to pay feudal dues to the king, whose children should pay for wardship and marriage, whose lands could conveniently lie in peril of forfeiture. They sacrificed, not unnaturally perhaps, the unity of the people to the money advantages with which the feudal lawyer could endow them in a system of living which the next generation broke in pieces. Yet here was the force which could have broken down the wall of tribal kinship and its effect on the communal use of land to which even in those days there were large exceptions.

The contract of marriage in the tribal community is the border line between the kinsfolk and the alien. One chief cause of the great jealousy felt by the community for the entrance of any stranger was that he might claim a share in the common property, whether he be foreign merchant or feckless wanderer, or the result of adoption or marriage.21 In consequence, alienation and inheritance by women has always been rather a vexed question, as tending to admit strangers into the community of landowners.

The general rule under tribal custom where women inherited was that the daughter took half a son's share in the father's property, and that in default of sons or of male issue, daughters would take all. Any such allowance of partition or of inheritance of the land of the community was carefully guarded, and limited in its interest.22 The absurdity so much resented by women that the child born in lawful wedlock belongs to the father, and the child born out of wedlock to the mother, is an archaism which our medieval magistrates' law inherits from the time when the acknowledged son belongs to the tribe of the father, the unacknowledged to the tribe of the mother.23

In all ancient societies of which we have historical records the descent in the first instance is in the male line. For this reason glosses which admit female inheritance are probably later. So long as the division of the land was among the tribe in its larger sense and not among the family, women could not inherit.24

But as the strength of the tribe will consist of the number of its fighting men, every provision will be framed so as to admit by adoption or other means fit men into the fighting force and therefore into the property-holding membership

of the tribe. However imperfect, owing to the jealousy of strangers, the rights might be of a woman who had married an alien, in respect of tribal property the son of such a woman would take a share as the grandson of her father, and the grandson, going with his alien father to the fight or to the hunt, and learning in his fosterage the customs of another community, would introduce a new view; he could not fail to modify the intolerant distrust of the man outside the family circle, which was at the bottom of all tribal dissension of the tribes or septs, as it is to-day of the political parties which represent them now in their worst aspects; he disturbed, very likely to great advantage at that stage of society, the bonds of kinship by introducing foreign blood as entitled to share in tribe lands, or in lands held in individual ownership intermixed with tribe lands, to which the only title was an undefiled pedigree orally handed down for many generations.

Very likely, if left to themselves, the men brought up under feudal custom might have gradually met and absorbed communal ideas by these agencies as they lived among and adapted themselves to the native Irish and Scandinavian. But the disturbance caused by the English authority too weakly enforced prevented any settlement, and the Roman church placed its irrevocable ban on the communal society, as it does to-day as far as possible on unity by marriage between Protestant and Roman Catholic.

NOTES. The annoit, dalta, and compairche churches, the rough equivalents of the tribe, group family, and family? 2 The gift of tribe land for a monastery or church was not a gift to a community, but to a person, the patron saint, as to Patrick who was a stranger, a fuidhir. If, as in such case, there was no member of the tribe of the saint ready to become abbot, the abbot is chosen from the tribe who owned the land, and in default from the mother church from which the daughter came. A.L. Irel., iii. 73, 75. 3 A.L. Irel., ii. 345. The Irish word manach is translated tenant of ecclesiastical lands, but the term itself appears to have nothing to do with land but to have some connection with monachus, and to denote labour and service. The commentary goes on to speak of the church's saer stock and daer stock ceiles (last line, p. 345). But the author of the commentary seems to have had some doubt himself as to the meaning of the word (line 27). 4 At the Synod of Cashel in 1172 a canon alluded to the existing payment of tithes. 5 A.L. Irel., iv. 227. 6 A.L. Irel., iii. 45. Irel., iii. 53. 8 When a bishop dies, all his property belongs to the king. A.L.W., II. xii. 9. On entering the church the tribal monk

9

A.L.

did not escape the tribal liabilities, and the tribe still claimed his money compensation. If a student for the ministry is killed, his body fine, according to urradhus law, is for his tribe. The chiefs shall not obtain anything of what the cain law adds. A.L. Irel., iii. 71. The cain or interterritorial law regulated the chief's fees, the urradhus local law the amount of the body fine. The fifth decree of the Synod of Cashel, 1172, exempted the clergy from contribution to any eric for their kindred. 10 A.L. Irel., iii. 51. 11 An apparent proof of its independence, and by the way an argument in favour of early date, is the allowance of interest on loans; it is to be paid on loans for a definite time when the time has come. A.L. Irel., iii. 493. 12 A.L. Irel., i. 132, note 3. 13 For an account of the work done and abbeys founded by the Scots of Ireland from the fifth to the twelfth century, see "L'Euvre des Scotti dans l'Europe Continentale," par R. L. P. Gougand, O.S.B., in La Revue d'Histoire Ecclésiastique, ix., Nos. 1, 2. 14 Mary Bateson," The Origin and History of Double Monasteries," Trans. of Royal Hist. Soc., 1899, xiii. 197. 15 "The technical transmission of our Apostolic Succession may be through Augustine. The living stream of Gospel truth mainly passed to us through British channels. Of one thing there can be no doubt that had it not been for British missionaries and for the independent missions of Birinus there would not have been one Christian Saxon fifty years after the mission was planted outside the boundaries of the Kentish kingdom." Haddan's Remains, p. 316. You pass from the Roman Augustine to the Greek Theodore. 16 Haddan, p. 292. 17 Haddan, p. 317. 18 See Appendix J, "Ireland of To-Day." 19 Statutes of Kilkenny, ch. xiii. and xiv. 20 Spenser, View of Ireland, pp. 123, 203. 21 A.L. Irel., ii. 285, 287. A man might have other wives on failure of issue, as well as a chief wife, following patriarchal custom. But he and she pay fines and presents to the chief wife (A.L. Irel., ii. 395), and if the second insults the first over her childlessness, the first wife may beat her until the blood comes-ibid., v. 142, and compare Genesis xvi. 4-6. 22 See A.L. Irel., iv. 39, 41, Commentary; A.L.W., Ven. II. i. 64, 59; T.A.C.N., cc. 6, 10, 14, 66 bis, 80 sect. 4; Goudie's Antiq. of Shetland, p. 84, note; Origines Islandica, Landnamaboc, II. iii. 5; Are's Libellus Islandorum; La Famille Celtique, par M. d'Arbois de Jubainville, bk. i. cc. 6 and 7; 0. and S. Records, Clouston, p. 142. 23 A.L. Irel., v. 453-459, unless invited by the tribe of the father. A.L.W., Ven. II. xxxi. If a woman unsuccessfully swear a child on a man as father, the child ranks with the kindred of the mother. As the proportion of the common land was in proportion to the number of the family, the bastard or even the adulterine bastard was not easily rejected. The son of women irregularly married took if acknowledged by the father. The father and kindred must deny him by solemn oath. Where her kindred were responsible for her having married a foreigner, her sons could share with her kindred through their mother (A.L.W., Ven. II. i. 59) and paid and received fines for injury as her children, only their maternal kindred joining in this. See Appendix H, "The Kinship of Mother and Child." 24 A.L. Irel., iv. 39. But the contract was a secular and fairly equal one, and the wife might be heir to her husband. See as to Indian customary law, Jaganatha's Digest, Colebrooke, iii. 458, and Manu, ix. 60, 69, 70.