to hide facts which may be known to every person who takes
the trouble to study the subject. I write in the interest of the
people--of the toiling masses; and I find that they were oppressed and
degraded by the ruling classes long before the Norman invader took
the place of the Celtic chief. And it is a curious fact that when the
Cromwellians turned the Catholic population out of their homes and
drove them into Connaught, they were but following the example set
them by the Milesian lords of the soil centuries before.

The late Mr. Darcy Magee, a real lover of his country, in his Irish
history points out this fact. The Normans found the population divided
into two great classes--the free tribes, chiefly if not exclusively
Celtic, and the unfree tribes, consisting of the descendants of the
subjugated races, or of clans once free, reduced to servitude by the
sword, and the offspring of foreign mercenary soldiers. 'The unfree
tribes,' says Mr. Darcy Magee, 'have left no history. Under the
despotism of the Milesian kings, it was high treason to record the
actions of the conquered race, so that the Irish Belgae fared as badly
in this respect at the hands of the Milesian historians as the latter
fared in after times from the chroniclers of the Normans. We only know
that such tribes were, and that their numbers and physical force more
than once excited the apprehension of the children of the conquerors.
One thing is certain--the jealous policy of the superior race never
permitted them to reascend the plane of equality from which they had
been hurled at the very commencement of the Milesian ascendency.'

Mr. Haverty, another Catholic historian, learned, accurate, and
candid, laments the oppression of the people by their native rulers.
'Those who boasted descent from the Scytho-Spanish hero would have
considered themselves degraded were they to devote themselves to
any less honourable profession than those of soldiers, _ollavs_, or
physicians; and hence the cultivation of the soil and the exercise of
the mechanic arts were left almost exclusively to the _Firbolgs_ and
the _Tuatha-de-Danans_--the former people, in particular, being still
very numerous, and forming the great mass of the population in
the west. These were ground down by high rents and the exorbitant
exactions of the dominant race, _in order to support their unbounded
hospitality_ and defray the expenses of costly assemblies; but this
oppression must have caused per