Page:The Gaelic State in the Past & Future.djvu/27

 economic unit in itself. The people were the stateship, and the stateship was the people, for with them the power finally lay. They ruled their own affairs within the limits of their stateship, but were held within the single purpose of the State by the unified code of laws outside of which it was not within their power to trangress [sic]. However weak the monarch might be, these laws, and the trained and hereditary brehons who administered them, held the stateships in a uniformity of practice that was remarkable long after the invader's foot had brought disruption. But within that uniformity each stateship worked out its own destiny according to its own local needs.

Originally, it would seem, the land held within the limits of the stateship was divided out among all its people. But strangers entered, outlaws from other stateships and men upon the world, who became servitors to the original freemen. These held no land, and therefore held no political rights in the stateship, inasmuch as they did not belong to its staple life. These were, broadly, the two main divisions of the social life: saor and daor, words only approximately rendered by free and unfree. There were sub-divisions within each of these. The unfree could, with time and by steady conduct, enter the ranks of the landowners. A number of them could as tradesmen form a guild, and as a corporate body claim political rights. But the staple life of the stateship being the life on the land, in the main only those who held land could have a voice in the guidance of its political destiny. These