manners and names, yet proscribed and insulted the native inhabitants
as an inferior race. Everything liberal towards them is intercepted in
its progress.

'The past history of Ulster is but a portion of Scottish history
inserted into that of Ireland--a stone in the Irish mosaic of an
entirely different quality and colour from the pieces that surround
it.

'Thus it came to pass that, through the confiscation of their lands
and the proscription of their religion, popery was worked by a most
vehement process into the blood and brain of the Irish nation.'

It has been often said that the Irish must be an inferior race, since
they allowed themselves to be subjugated by some thousands of English
invaders. But it should be recollected, first, that the conquest,
commenced by Henry II. in the twelfth century, was not completed till
the seventeenth century, when the King's writ ran for the first time
through the province of Ulster, the ancient kingdom of the O'Neills;
in the second place, the weakness of the Celtic communities was not so
much the fault of the men as of their institutions, brought with them
from the East and clung to with wonderful tenacity. So long as they
had boundless territory for their flocks and herds, and could always
move on 'to pastures new,' they increased and multiplied, and allowed
the sword and the battle-axe to rest, unless when a newly elected
chief found it necessary to give his followers 'a hosting'--which
means an expedition for plunder. Down to the seventeenth century,
after five hundred years' contact with the Teutonic race, they were
essentially the same people as they were when the ancient Greeks
and Romans knew them. They are thus described by Dr. Mommsen in his