pattern, not after that of Nimrod, and perhaps that of Cain, which alone, in the estimation of the modern world, is civilization. This easily explains the facility and thoroughness with which the Irish people received the faith, when preached to them by their great apostle, unexampled elsewhere; and it also explains the antagonism of the Irish and AngloNormans, which was as great when both professed the same religion as it has been since the English nation apostatized, as well as why no modern nation has ever extended a helping hand to the Irish in their fearful struggle for existence, except moved by motives of self-interest or of hostility to England.

The antagonism is not due precisely to difference of race, but to the difference of civilization. To the Anglo-Norman, the Irish, representing the oldest civilization in the world, which they had, as we have said, preserved in comparative purity from Noah down to the traitor king of Leinster, were not civilized at all, but barbarians, savages of little more account than wild beasts, whom, as it is said to-day of our Indian tribes, the interests of civilization required to be exterminated; while to the Irish mind, the Anglo-Normans were robbers, ruffians, unmitigated savages, cruel, heartless, without any sense of justice or humanity, worthy descendants of the pirates of the North, veneered by a thin covering-derived through France-of the Græco-Roman or Italo-Greek civilization, itself of barbaric origin. The two civilizations were essentially antagonistic, and by no possibility could coexist on the same territory in harmony. The Normans at first tried to bring the Irish under their order of civilization; but failing in that they directed their efforts for four hundred years to the degradation and extinction of the Irish race, with what success history tells us when it states that the great Anglo-Norman lords settled in Ireland, adopted the manners and customs of the Irish, intermarried with them, and became more Irish than the Irish themselves.

Perhaps one of the most striking chapters of Father Thébaud's book is that in which he presents the Irish clan system in conflict with Norman feudalism. He is disposed to ascribe the origin of feudalism to the Scandinavians, though others suppose it to be of Germanic origin; we see no reason for denying it a Romanic origin. Under the Roman system political power and civil rights were attached to the land, not to the person or proprietor, nor to the gens.

The land was held to own the man, not the man the land. Under the Roman empire, the emperor, who succeeded to all the rights of the republic, political, civil, military, and religious, was held to be the sole proprietor accepted by the land, and hence, as we say now, the sole landholder. All others held land only by lease or by benefice from the emperor. Here, if we mistake not, are all the bases of feudalism. Under feudalism political power and civil rights went with the land, and were the same, let who would be the landholder. They attached to the fief, not to the person of the feudatory. In the Irish order of civilization, the land after a certain reserve for the chiefs, belonged to the clansmen in common, while the power, regulated by law and custom, was vested in the chief, whose kindred all the clan were or were held to be. The chief's power did not rest on his being the supreme landlord, but on his relationship to the clan; and its exercise was tempered by affection, as is that of the father of the family. All the clansmen were of the family of the chief or chieftain, either by blood or adoption. Hence the Irish system tended to preserve the family, and to develop and strengthen that wonderful family affection-love for husbands and wives, parents and children, brothers and sisters, and relatives to the remotest degree-so characteristic, in our own day even, of the Irish, and which contrasts so strikingly with the indifference of the Anglo-Saxons, who sold their own offspring into slavery, and the feeble influence of family and domestic affections among us Anglo-Americans. They are not Irish mothers, unless completely americanized, among whom prevails the horrid and shameful practice of foeticide, which, but for the migration of foreigners hither, would, if continued, before many years depopulate the country, especially in the older settled states.

The author has spoken of the marvellous force of expansion of the Keltic race, but there is one characteristic of the Irish, which, though his whole book tends to prove it, we do not find that he anywhere distinctly notes: that is, their marvellous power of absorption or of assimilation of foreign elements. The French have it in a certain degree, the Teutonic races not at all. The Gerinan never assimilates a foreign tribe, and makes it German. He can be assimilated, but cannot assimilate. Ireland has been invaded and overrun, in one sense conquered, many times; but in all cases the Irish have succeeded in absorbing and assimilating their

conquerors. The Danes that invaded the island, reënforced for the space of two hundred years with new expeditions from Scandinavia, were either expelled or absorbed into the population of the country as good Irishmen, without impairing in any perceptible degree the force of the Irish civilization. The Anglo-Normans, backed by the whole force of England, made relentless war on the Irish civilization for four hundred years without success, and found themselves at the end transformed into Irishmen, with Irish tastes, Irish manners and customs, fighting in defence of Irish laws and institutions. The English apostatized from the church, and tried to overcome the Irish persistence in their faith and traditional civilization, by sustaining with its armies Protestant ascendency, and a penal legislation that pagan Rome might have envied. Yet it did not succeed. By bribes-the Protestant method of conversion, where physical force fails it; by establishing and sustaining Protestant colonies in the island; by robbing the chief and his clansmen of their land, and reducing the mass of the people to the most abject poverty, they so far gained ground, that at the beginning of the eighteenth century, when the population was not far from three millions, the Protestants, of all classes and nationalities, were about equal in numbers to the Irish who adhered to their traditional faith and usages. The clans were broken up; the chiefs exterminated, living in exile, or reduced to the ranks of the peasantry; a new nobility, aliens in blood and religion, substituted for them and endowed with the lands of the clan or sept; and yet at the end of that century, the most gloomy century perhaps in Irish history, the Irish had become nearly four to one of the resident Protestant population of the island, and now, with a population in round numbers of five and a half millions, four millions and a half are Catholics, without counting the millions of Catholics that have been swept away by famine and pestilence or that have emigrated to the United States and to every part of the British empire.

This proves that the Irish civilization, placed side by side with any other, is the stronger, more persistent, more normal, and, with every earthly advantage against it, is sure to gain the victory. This we attribute to the fact that it preserves the primitive traditions of mankind, reënforced by the Catholic faith, while all other civilizations have originated since the lapse of the nations into barbarism and idolatry, and are repugnant to, or at best a departure from, the

normal order of society, or to the Christian order of civilization. The Irish order is based on truer, deeper, and more universal principles than the Anglo-Norman, the modern English, or the ancient Romanic order. The Irish offered little or no opposition to the reception of Christianity, and St. Patrick left Ireland more thoroughly Christian at his death, after thirty-two years of apostolic labors, than the Roman empire was more than six hundred years after St. Peter had erected his apostolic chair in Rome, the capital and centre of the pagan world. Indeed, the Italo-Greek or Romanic civilization was inherently opposed to Christianity, and the struggle of the church with it has never ceased and is to-day, in Italy, Germany, Russia, and the East, hardly less fierce than it was in the time of Nero, Decius, or Diocletian.

The Irish civilization being traditional, and the perpetuation of that which obtained before the lapse of the gentile world into barbarism-the result of idolatry and devil-worship -and in greater purity and vigor than that of any other people, except the Hebrew people, it is necessarily stronger than any other; and as long as the Irish people are true to it, it is invincible. The only formidable enemies it has to dread are those hot-headed, enthusiastic, but ill-advised patriots who place Ireland before the Irish, and labor to unite all the inhabitants of the island, whatever their creed or sect, in defence, not of Irish civilization, but of Ireland. Their success would be the destruction of Irish civilization, which places the man before the land, and would base sovereignty in the the landholder instead of the chief whose authority derives from his personal relation to his clansmen. They are, unconsciously perhaps, laboring to plant in Ireland the system which the Irish race has ever resisted, and thus far, on its own soil, at the cost of untold sufferings, has successfully resisted. They are laboring not to restore to the Irish race the ownership of Ireland, but to make the Irish territory the owner of the people who inhabit it, as the sacred territory of ancient Rome was the owner of the Roman senate and people, and their sovereign. These patriots, whether called Young Irelanders, Fenians, or advocates of Home Rule, are seeking to substitute a territorial sovereign for a personal chief, a territorial magistracy for the patriarch, the father or head of a family: that is, the Roman or AngloNorman order of civilization, sprung from barbarism and idolatry, as developed or modified by modern American and

continental republicanism, for the Irish civilization which finds its type and basis in the Noachic civilization, which it has retained for over four thousand years. They are, perhaps without knowing it, traitors to Irish civilization, to all that has distinguished the Irish race, and constituted its glory. Hence the Irish prelates and clergy as a body, while deeply resenting the wrongs of their people and sympathizing with their sufferings, are strongly opposed to those socalled patriots who place the land or country above the people. The last day of the Ireland of tradition, of history, of glory, will have come, when the Catholic Irish, the only real Irish, shall listen to them so far as to be induced to assume a ground on which their bitter enemies could unite with them and both act together in harmony as one people, for an abstraction called country. The Irisli need only wait patiently for a few years longer, and all the inhabitants of the island will, in spite of England, be assimilated to them, and the victory be won. It is nearly won now, and it would be bad policy, and worse strategy, to abandon the advantages already gained.

We have always heretofore regarded the Græco-Roman type of civilization, as developed in our American constitution, as the highest type of civilization the world has known since the great gentile apostasy, and supposed that it only needed the Catholic faith and worship to be perfect as any civilized order can be; but Father Thébaud, in giving us a clew to Irish history, which we before had lacked, has enabled us to perceive a higher as well as an older type, which we call the Irish type, and which is not only higher and older, but stronger and more persistent, through what we believe have been and still are the designs of Providence with regard to the Irish race. Were we writing our "American Republic" now, after having read Father Thébaud-from whom we seldom differ, except in drawing conclusions from his premises different from those he himself draws-we should so far modify it as to place the Irish type above the Roman, and to correct, in some respects, our definition of barbarism. We had not studied with proper care the patriarchal civilization, nor did we then understand that the Irish race had preserved it in greater purity and vigor than any other people, except the Hebrew people, until the coming of the Messiah.

We may be told of the internal feuds of the septs and clans; we are not ignorant of them, and have been nauseated