PREFACE.

has never been, like Gaul, conquered by the Romans. What was the result of this apparent superiority of the Irish over us? Here is that result: it was the maintenance of the right to murder in Ireland, in exchange for the payment of a compositionA financial compensation or fine paid to the victim's family to settle a crime, common in early legal systems (known as "eric" in Irish law), which the author views as an inferior substitute for Roman criminal law. fixed by custom; it was permanent civil war until an English conquest which—carried out bit by bit from the twelfth to the seventeenth century and made easy by the divisions among the Irish—resulted, on one hand, in the almost universal spoliationThe act of plundering or stripping someone of their property and rights. of the Irish landowner, reduced to the status of a tenant farmer; on the other hand, the transfer of almost all real estate on the island to a few hundred foreigners substituted for the ancient owners by an ultra-feudal revolution, the exact opposite of our own.

Could this then be the ideal of those who consider the fall of Gallic independenceThe period before the Roman conquest of Gaul (modern-day France) led by Julius Caesar. a disaster—when the great patriot VercingétorixThe chieftain of the Arverni tribe who united the Gauls in a revolt against Roman forces but was defeated by Caesar at the Siege of Alesia in 52 BCE. succumbed in the middle of the first century before our era?

And yet, through a contradiction that cannot be emphasized enough, patriotism is the