to take to rocks and precipices for security; for native rulers, there is no such fortress as justice and humanity.’  This is very fine, but surely Mr. Prendergast cannot mean that the Irish chiefs were distinguished by their justice and humanity.  The following touch is still grander:—­’The Irish, like the wealthiest and highest of the present day, loved detached houses surrounded by fields and woods.  Towns and their walls they looked upon as tombs or sepulchres, &c.’  As to fields, there were none, because the Irish never made fences, their patches of cultivated land being divided by narrow strips of green sod.  Besides, they lived in villages, which were certainly surrounded by woods, because the woods were everywhere, and they furnished the inhabitants with fuel and shelter, as well as materials for building their huts.

But further on this able author expresses himself much more in accordance with the truth of history, when he states that the ’Irish enemy’ was no nation in the modern sense of the word, but a race divided into many nations or tribes, separately defending their lands from the English barons in the immediate neighbourhood.  There had been no ancient national government displaced, no dynasty overthrown; the Irish had no national flag, nor any capital city as the metropolis of their common country, nor any common administration of law.’  He might have added that they had no mint.  There never was an Irish king who had his face stamped on a coin of his realm.  Some stray pieces of money found their way into the country from abroad, but up to the close of the sixteenth century the rudest form of barter prevailed in Ulster, and accounts were paid not in coins but in cows.  Even the mechanical arts which had flourished in the country before the arrival of the Celts had gradually perished, and had disappeared at the time of the English invasion.  Any handy men could build a house of mud and wattles.  Masons, carpenters, smiths, painters, glaziers, &c., were not wanted by a people who despised stone buildings as prisons, and abhorred walled towns as sepulchres.  Spinning and weaving were arts cultivated by the women, each household providing materials for clothing, which was little used in warm weather, and thrown off when fighting or any other serious work was to be done.

I should be sorry to disparage the Celtic race, or any other race, by exaggerating their bad qualities or suppressing any reliable testimony to their merits.  But with me the truth of history is sacred.  Both sides of every case should be fairly stated.  Nothing can be gained by striving to hide facts which may be known to every person who takes the trouble to study the subject.  I write in the interest of the people—­of the toiling masses; and I find that they were oppressed and degraded by the ruling classes long before the Norman invader took the place of the Celtic chief.  And it is a curious fact that when the Cromwellians turned the Catholic population out of their homes and drove them into Connaught, they were but following the example set them by the Milesian lords of the soil centuries before.