Page:The Gaelic State in the Past & Future.djvu/26

 in which some famous man fell than to record the continuous social life of a community. The result is that in the records the battles seem to obliterate the social life, and plunge it into chaos. To the modern mind particularly it seems so, for the modern man knows nothing of wars save as great continental cataclysms, in which whole nations are hurled against whole nations, and all life is brought to a standstill, while death claims its daily thousands, and chivalry is displaced by venom and hatred. The modern mind must not judge of ancient days by the world's decay. The "battles," that the belittlers of Ireland are so eager to emphasise, as little suspended the general life of the country, seldom employed a larger hosting of men on each side, and even used few weapons more destructive, than the faction fights of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. We know, for instance, that the eleventh century, when Ireland was involved in a triangular dynastic dispute and more full of wars than at any other time, is famous for its literary activity. Historians were busy, old tales were re-written, and great books were compiled. All this, we are told, came from a soil across which wars were surging; but the result clearly shows that these wars did not suspend, or even greatly impede, the artistic, social and economic life of the Nation. It is necessary to see this, and to get a right perspective^ in perceiving the life of the nation in the polity it achieved.

Bach separate stateship was at once two things. It was a political unit in the State and a social and