The Lasting Effects of Feudalism. 5 



some blue-blooded visitor from the old country, he regards 

 with feelings the leverse of respect any individual of his 

 own colony who has obtained a patent of nobility. The 

 powdered flunkey, a survival of the Feudal Incident of 

 Liveries, is a rarity in the new land. Courtesy, a marked 

 feature in the old polity, is not, as here, the consequence 

 of gentle birth. In good manners, if in little else, the smart 

 young bloods who parade Hyde Park on a Sunday afternoon 

 would incomparably excel the fashionable youths who pass as 

 their counterparts in the social circles of Melbourne or Vic- 

 toria.^ 



From this superficial glance at Mr. Froude's book, we may 

 safely decide that the Anglo-Saxon idiosyncrasy and Feudalism 

 are by no means inseparable. At the outset our forefathers 

 were probably as antagonistic to its repellent restrictions as 

 the Celts, though, unlike the latter, they possessed that ethnic 

 ability (germ of much that is connected with their ultimate 

 greatness) of adapting tastes and habits to fresh circumstances, 

 and of assimilating into their national system any economy 

 for which the force of events might raise a cry. 



In order to see this the more clearly, let us now examine the 

 inception and progress of Feudalism amidst some purely Celtic 

 nationality, and let our choice of such fall upon the Celts of 

 Ireland and Scotland, since at the period now reached the 

 inhabitants of both these countries had become permanent and 

 important factors in what is called, for the sake of brevity, the 

 English Constitution, 



Now the history of the Irish Celt is in many respects very 

 similar to that of the English Teuton. Entrancing though 

 the legendary period of Irish history undoubtedly is, there is 

 no necessity for our present purpose to trace back the unit of 

 a Hibernian society beyond the tribe. The sept, or tuath, is 

 in occupation of its tribal territory, when we open the pages 

 of Ireland's past. The toisech, the tanist, the file, and other 

 office-bearers possess in severalty their separate holdings of 

 rig and flath, and the rest of the tribesmen pursue a system 



* Fi-oude's Ocpctna, passim. 



