Irish Nationality

								

country and drew to its schools students from far and wide. Through
their work the spirit of the Irish found national expression in a code
of law which showed not only extraordinarily acute and trained
intelligence but a true sense of equity, in a literary language of
great richness and of the utmost musical beauty, and in a system of
metrical rules for poets shaped with infinite skill. The Irish nation
had a pride in its language beyond any people in Europe outside of the
Greeks and Romans.
While each tribe had its schools, these were linked together in a
national system. Professors of every school were free of the island;
it was the warrior's duty to protect them as they moved from court to
court. An ancient tale tells how the chiefs of Emain near Armagh
placed sentinels along the Gap of the North to turn back every poet
who sought to leave the country and to bring on their way with honour
every one who sought to enter in. There was no stagnation where
competition extended over the whole island. The greatest of the
teachers were given the dignity of "Professors of all the Gaels."
Learned men in their degrees ranked with kings and chiefs, and
high-professors sat by the high-king and shared his honours. The king,
said the laws, "could by his mere word decide against every class of
persons except those of the two orders of religion and learning, who
are of equal value with himself."
It is in this exaltation of learning in the national life that we must
look for the real significance of Irish history--the idea of a society
loosely held in a political sense, but bound together in a spiritual
union. The assemblies which took place in every province and every
petty state were the guarantees of the national civilization. They were
periodical exhibitions of everything the people esteemed--democracy,
aristocracy, king-craft, literature, tradition, art, commerce, law,
sport, religion, display, even rustic buffoonery. The years between one
festival and another were spent in serious preparation for the next; a
multitude of maxims were drawn up to direct the conduct of the people.
So deeply was their importance felt that the Irish kept the tradition
diligently, and even in the darkest times of their history, down to the
seventeenth century, still gathered to "meetings on hills" to exercise
their law and hear their learned men.
In the time of the Roman Empire, therefore, the Irish looked on
themselves as one race, obedient to one law, united in one culture and
belonging to one country. Their unity is symbolised by the great
genealogical compilations in which all the Gaels are traced to one
ancestry, and in the collections of topographical legends dealing with
hundreds of places, where every nook and corner of the island is
supposed to be of interest to the whole of Ireland. The tribal
boundaries were limits to the material power of a chief and to that
only: they were no barriers to the national thought or union. The