or educate the newly-converted Germanic tribes in Merovingian and
Carlovingian Gaul, in Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian England, in
Lombardian Italy, in the very hives of those ferocious tribes
which peopled the ever-moving and at that time convulsed Germany.

II. They were right in refusing to submit to the Scandinavian yoke,
and accept from those who would impose it their taste for city life,
and the spirit of maritime enterprise and extensive commerce. We
shall see that this was at the bottom of their two centuries of
struggle with the Danes; that they were animated throughout that
conflict by their ardent zeal for the Christian religion, which
the Northmen came to destroy. There is no need of dwelling on this
point, as we are not aware that any one, even their bitterest
enemies, has found fault with them here.

III. They were right in opposing feudalism, and steadily refusing
to admit it on their soil. Feudal Europe beheld with surprise the
inhabitants of a small island on the verge of the Western Continent
level to the ground the feudal castles as soon as they were built;
reject with scorn the invaders' claim to their soil, after they
had signed papers which they could not understand; hold fast to
their patriarchal usages in opposition to the new-born European
notions of paramount kings, of dukes, earls, counts, and viscounts;
fight for four hundred years against what the whole of Europe had
everywhere else accepted, and conquer in the end; so that the Irish
of to-day can say with just pride, "Our island has never submitted
to mediaeval feudalism."

And hence the island has escaped the modern results of the system,
which we all witness to-day in the terrible hostility of class