Page:The Gaelic State in the Past & Future.djvu/57

 lands in the very groupings in which it had held them in old times in free possession.

The change was that the freemen were a rent-paying tenantry. In other words, there were, as it were, two layers through the country, and each layer represented its own State-idea. The topmost layer was the landlordry, which, being in power, had enforced its own State-idea. When it became, as it finally did, an absentee landlordry, that State-idea did not voice any of the desires, expectations or intuitions of the resident population. In fact, it outraged them at every point. The more truly was this the case when, under the Penal code, the submerged layer of the rent-paying tenantry was denied every right in the existent State. In the words of the Lord Chancellor of that State, "The law" (that is to say, the law of the imported State) "did not suppose any such person to exist as an Irish Catholic/* The two State-ideas were not only mutually contradictory, but they were deliberately kept apart; and there is no indication to show that those who carried in their instincts or memories the old State-idea took any interest in the foreign State except the interest of sufferers.

Such was the position during the eighteenth century. The Nation seemed dead and buried, with a stone rolled across its sepulchre. Any thought of its resurrection would have been treated by its jailers as a proper subject for comedy. Certainly its Polity seemed to have passed into history—indeed, to have passed beyond history, for those jailers did not intend to let intellectual curiosity, their's or