Page:The Gaelic State in the Past & Future.djvu/36

 that the schools of Ireland became so famous that scholars and students came from overseas to learn in them, would require a national excellence in statecraft commensurate with the national care of scholarship. Rare roses do not usually grow on waste heaps: a truth that it is sometimes useful to remember. Not the least excellence of the State was the equal dignity it gave to women. Whether women exercised political rights or not it is impossible to say; but in the social and economic spheres they took their place as the equal of men. In marriage, for instance, whatever a woman brought to the union remained hers. If the pair were divorced each took his and her own share; whereas if either could prove that by his or her labour the common estate had prospered more than by the labour of the other, that proportion, as fixed by the brehon, was added to the share. The same was true if either of them brought nothing to the union. Never once do we find the law of the Irish State—recognising any inequality between the sexes; and that again was remarkable in the Europe of the time. The whole conception of the Irish State in the ideals which it upheld, in the care with which it was wrought, in the balance of its parts and its simple scheme yet intricate texture—both in what it sought and in what it achieved, may well challenge comparison with the labours of statecraft in any place and at. any time.