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Proceedings of the Boyal Society 
still vested in the tribe, and the king had hut a user of them for 
his life or office. Then came the church, and another part of the 
tribal lands — the ternal — was set aside for it. But an influence 
more powerful, perhaps because more subtle than even the regal and 
the religious, operated to disturb the equilibrium — money began to 
exercise its sway : dealing with the Irish as the oldest type of the 
Gaelic tenure, we find the share of the annual allotment of land was 
regulated by the extent of the herd of each member of the tribe 
perfect equality even in these early days was a matter of theory, 
and was maintained not because men ivere equal, but only until the 
supremacy of the fittest had asserted itself according to the inviolable 
law of progress; and as personal property was undoubtedly separate 
and individual, the thrifty, the skilful, the industrious, would soon 
become the rich in cattle, and would soon come to have an increas- 
ing share , of the common arable land, while the pasture was still 
common to all equally. Thence arose a very peculiar form of 
tenure; when one of the tribe became so rich as to have more 
cattle than he could find pasture for on his own allotment, he lent 
his surplus stock to less careful or less fortunate members of the 
tribe, who thus became his tenants'^ 
It is very notable that in this, which we must accept as the 
most pristine form of the relation between landlord and tenant, the 
landlord was required to contribute the stock as the essential 
element in the transaction, and the rent was paid not for the land 
but for the stock ; it is evident that the idea of a separate personal 
possession of the land was very imperfectly developed at that stage 
in the history of the tribe at which the power of money first began 
to effect a differentiation between the members of the tribe, and we 
have the germ presented to us of the relation now so familiar of 
landlord and tenant. 
But this rudimentary differentiation which we recognise in the 
Irish tribe rapidly grew, and it developed into one of the worst and 
most fatal, but still essential, characteristics of all early tenures and 
of all early society ; if it contained within it the germ of the land- 
lord and tenant of later days, it contained a germ of more dangerous 
import tO; and more immediate influence on, infant communities. 
* Skene’s Celtic Scotland, vol. iii. p. 142. 
t Idem, p. 147. 
