tted
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 n