Page:The Gaelic State in the Past & Future.djvu/33

 give his judgment; the rest lay with the stateship.

An old text reads: " The feast of Tara &hellip; the body of law which all Ireland enacted then, during the interval between that and their next convention at a year's end, none dared to trangress; and he that perchance did so was outlawed from the men of Ireland." If any man, therefore, resisted a judgment made against him, the stateship outlawed him, and withdrew all association with him. Thrust out from all rights, he could only become a wanderer on the earth. Little wonder that the Chief Baron, Lord Finglas, could say, even so late as 1520, when the central authority was gone, "Irishmen doth keep and observe such laws which they make upon hills in their country firm and stable, without breaking them for any favour or reward." And even Attorney-General Da vies, of ill-fame, declared in 1607: "There is no nation of people under the sun that doth equal and indifferent justice better than the Irish, or will rest better satisfied with the execution thereof, although it be against themselves, as they may have the protection and benefit of the law when upon just cause they do desire it." The reason is not far to seek. Law in the old Irish State was not a mere technical contrivance to be argued from black-letter, as now happens, by a few men whom the people universally distrust; it was founded on a whole nation's sense of justice. Nor was it lawyers who put it into execution; but a stateship of freemen, acting in community, who enforced its obedience or expelled the offender by withdrawing all dealings with him.