The Irish Race in the Past and the Present | Page 9

of historians, and to which we intend to draw
the attention of our readers.
The primitive, simple, patriarchal system of clanship was Confronted
by the stern, young, ferocious feudal system, which was then beginning
to prevail all over Europe. The question was, Would Ireland consent to
become European as Europe was then organizing herself? The struggle,
as we shall see, between the Irish and the English in the twelfth century
and later on, was merely a contest between the sept system and
feudalism, involving, it is true, the possession of land. And, at the end
of a contest lasting four hundred years, feudalism was so thoroughly
defeated that the English of the Pale adopted the Irish manners,
customs, and even language, and formed only new septs among the old
ones.
Hence Ireland escaped all the commotions produced in Europe by the
consequences of the feudal system:
I. Serfdom, which was generally substituted for slavery, never existed
in Ireland, slavery having disappeared before the entry of the
Anglo-Normans.
II. The universal oppression of the lower classes, which caused the
simultaneous rising of the communes all over Europe, never having
existed in Ireland, we shall not be surprised to find no mention in Irish
history of that wide-spread institution of the eleventh and following
centuries.
III. An immense advantage which Ireland derived from her isolation,
on which she always insisted, was her being altogether freed from the
fearful mediaeval heresies which convulsed France particularly for a
long period, and which invariably came from the East.
For Erin remained so completely shut off from the rest of Europe, that,

in spite of its ardent Catholicism, the Crusades were never preached to
its inhabitants; and, if some individual Irishman joined the ranks of the
warriors led to Palestine by Richard Coeur de Lion, the nation was in
no way affected by the good or bad results which everywhere ensued
from the marching of the Christian armies against the Moslem.
The sects which sprang from Manicheism were certainly an evil
consequence of the holy wars; and it would be a great error to think that
those heresies were short-lived and affected only for a brief space of
time the social and moral state of Europe. It may be said that their
fearfully disorganizing influence lasts to this day. If modern secret
societies do not, in point of fact, derive their existence directly from the
Bulgarism and Manicheism of the Middle Ages, there is no doubt that
those dark errors, which Imposed on all their adepts a stern secrecy,
paved the way for the conspiracies of our times. Hence Ireland, not
having felt the effect of the former heresies, is in our days almost free
from the universal contagion now decomposing the social fabric on all
sides.
But it is chiefly in modern times that the successful resistance offered
by Ireland to many wide-spread European evils, and its strong
attachment to its old customs, will evoke our wonder.
Clanship reigned still over more than four-fifths of the island when the
Portuguese were conquering a great part of India, and the Spaniards
making Central and South America a province of their almost universal
monarchy.
The poets, harpers, antiquarians, genealogists, and students of Brehon
law, still held full sway over almost the whole island, when the revival
of pagan learning was, we may say, convulsing Italy, giving a new
direction to the ideas of Germany, and penetrating France, Holland, and
Switzerland. Happy were the Irish to escape that brilliant but fatal
invasion of mythology and Grecian art and literature! Had they not
received enough of Greek and Latin lore at the hands of their first
apostles and missionaries, and through the instrumentality of the
numerous amanuenses and miniaturists in their monasteries and
convents? Those holy men had brought them what Christian Rome had
purified of the old pagan dross, and sanctified by the new Divine Spirit.
Virgin Ireland having thus remained undefiled, and never having even
been agitated by all those earlier causes of succeeding revolutions,

Protestantism, the final explosion of them all, could make no
impression on her--a fact which remains to this day the brightest proof
of her strength and vigor.
But, before speaking of this last conflict, we must meet an objection
which will naturally present itself.
To steadily refuse to enter into the current of European thought, and
object to submit in any way to its influence, is, pretend many, really to
reject the claims of civilization, and persist in refusing to enter upon the
path of progress. The North American savage has always been most
persistent in this stubborn opposition to civilized life, and no one has as
yet considered this a praiseworthy attribute. The more barbarous a tribe,
the more firmly it adheres to its traditions, the more pertinaciously it
follows the customs of