and Angles--there is still a great gulf fixed. It is quite
impossible for one of the tillers of the soil to stand on a footing of
equality with the old baronial class, and the gulf has widened, rather
than closed, since the battle of Hastings and the final overthrow of the
Saxon power.

We see here the full contrast between the ideal of kingship in Ireland
and that which grew up among the Norman conquerors of the Saxons. The
Irish king was always in theory and often in fact a real representative,
duly elected by the free suffrage of his tribesmen; he was not owner of
the tribal land, as the duke of the Normans was; he was rather the
leader of the tribe, chosen to guard their common possessions. The
communal system of Ireland stands here face to face with the feudal
system of the Normans.

It would be a study of great interest to consider what form of national
life might have resulted in Ireland from the free growth of this
principle of communal chieftainship. There are many analogies in other
lands, all of which point to the likelihood of a slow emergence of the
hereditary principle; a single family finally overtopping the whole
nation. Had this free development taken place, we might have had a
strong and vigorous national evolution, an abundant flowering of all our
energies and powers through the Middle Ages, a rich and vigorous
production of art and literature, equal to the wonderful blossoming of
genius in the Val d'Arno and Venice and Rome; but we should have missed
something much greater than all these; something towards which events
and destiny have been leading us, through the whole of the Middle Ages
and modern times.

From this point forward we shall have to trace the working of that
destiny, not manifested in a free blossoming and harvesting of our
national life, but rather in the suppression and involution of our
powers; in a development arrested by pressure from without and kept thus
suspended until the field was ready for its real work. Had our fate been
otherwise, we might now be looking back to a great mediaeval past, as
Spain and Austria look back; it is fated that we shall look not back but
forwards, brought as we are by destiny into the midst of the modern
world, a people with energy unimpaired, full of vigorous vital force,
uncorrupted by the weakening influence of wealth, taught by our own
history the measureless evil of oppression, and therefore cured once for
all of the desire to dominate others