No system of representation seems ever to have prevailed in Ireland.  That idea is, in fact, almost purely Teutonic, and seems never to have sprung up spontaneously amongst any Celtic people.  The family was the real root.  Every head of a family ruled his own household, and submitted in his turn to the rule of his chief.  Blood-relationship, including fosterage, was the only real and binding union; that larger connection known as the clan or sept, having the smaller one of the family for its basis, as was the case also amongst the clans of the Scotch highlands.  Theoretically, all members of a clan, high and low alike, were held to be the descendants of a common ancestor, and in this way to have a real and direct claim upon one another.  If a man was not in some degree akin to another he was no better than a beast, and might be killed like one without compunction whenever occasion arose.

Everything thus began and centred around the tribe or sept.  The whole theory of life was purely local.  The bare right of existence extended only a few miles from your own door, to the men who bore the same name as yourself.  Beyond that nothing was sacred; neither age nor sex, neither life nor goods, not even in later times the churches themselves.  Like his cousin of the Scotch Highlands, the Irish tribesman’s life was one perpetual carnival of fighting, burning, raiding, plundering, and he who plundered oftenest was the finest hero.

All this must be steadily borne in mind as it enables us to understand, as nothing else will, that almost insane joy in and lust for fighting, that marked inability to settle down to orderly life which runs through all Irish history from the beginning almost to the very end.

Patriotism, too, it must be remembered, is in the first instance only an idea, and the narrowest of local jealousies may be, and often are, forms merely of the same impulse.  To men living in one of these small isolated communities, each under the rule of its own petty chieftain, it was natural and perhaps inevitable that the sense of connection with those outside their own community should have been remarkably slight, and of nationality, as we understand the word, quite non-existent.  Their own little circle of hills and valleys, their own forests and pasturage was their world, the only one practically of which they had any cognizance.  To its scattered inhabitants of that day little Ireland must have seemed a region of incalculable extent, filled with enemies to kill or to be killed by; a region in which a man might wander from sunrise to sunset yet never reach the end, nay, for days together without coming to a second sea.  As Greece to a Greek of one of its smaller states it seemed vast simply because he had never in his own person explored its limits.

[Illustration:  MOUTH OF SEPULCHRAL CHAMBER AT DOWTH, NEW GRANGE.]

IV.

ST. PATRICK THE MISSIONARY.