Page:The Gaelic State in the Past & Future.djvu/46

 not only in the theory but in the practice and working of the State, that authority was based on a free people. The State's only property, and the final source of all its wealth, the land, was owned by the people in corporate stateships; and those corporate stateships had its assemblies of freemen which discussed and adjudicated its affairs. The national life was one of high ideals of Art; of physical and mental aristocracy; it held in high esteem its intellectual leaders; it prized its scholarship but these ideals were rooted in the possession and husbandry of the soil. The student will need to search well before he betters the Irish State; and the more truly he search the more deeply he will wonder at the strange tragedy that it should have been hindered at a critical hour of its development.

V.

, when he came to Ireland, with a somewhat munificent gesture made grants of large tracts of territory to his underlings. It was nobly done; to make gifts of other people's property to one's own friends requires a noble mind. Therefore the lordly underlings settled along the waterways of the territory allotted to them, built castles, and from these castles raided the economic life of the country around them. At first the stateships received the newcomers as strangers coming