Page:Ireland and England in the past and at present.djvu/26

 that it is the speeches of the Irish members which give savor to the parliamentary debates of the United Kingdom; and in a way this is true. On the other hand, it has been widely said that as the past has been so will the future be; the Irishman who was backward once and unable to get for himself good government, is after all the Irishman of the present, whom it would be unwise to trust with Home Rule. Actually, as in all things, the truth seems to lie somewhere in between these partisan statements. The Gaels of earlier Ireland lived in the midst of conditions which had some beauty and much good inherent in them, and were well suited to the times when they developed, but which were rude and primitive compared with what came later on, and were abandoned generally as peoples rose upward in the scale of culture.

The old Gaels were organized in tribal communities, where family relationship was the strongest of all ties. Just as writers of the nineteenth century of the Teutonist school often took from Tacitus an account of early Germanic communities consisting of democratic assemblies of freemen, with their families and dependents, so now there are Irish writers who describe the Gaelic tribal system as something excellent and democratic, giving freest play to development of national character.

"The law with them was the law of the people. They never lost their trust in it. Hence they never exalted a central authority, for their law needed no such sanction. While the code was one for the whole race, the administration on"