* * * * * Still, in spite of all, a certain contagion of habits took place between the contiguous races. A few native chiefs insensibly began to imitate the manners of the English. The English were not long in discovering a way to reconcile them—by appealing to their basest impulses. Until then, the Irish had had no knowledge of individual property. With them land was, like the sky or the air they breathed, the common inheritance of those who occupied it. The members of a clan, indeed, paid the chieftain a tax or annual duty, but they did not conceive it as possible that this leader could look on himself as the master of the social fund to which they, like him, had a hereditary right. At the most they expected their harvest or cattle to be seized, in case of non-payment of the tax. There never had been an eviction of the tenant, as there had been no sale or transfer of the land by him occupied. Individual appropriation, as resulting from the feudal system, was such a new idea to the Irish that they were at first unable to grasp it. “What interest can you have in making your clan give up their land to the English, since you get it back in return for your homage?” would ask some of the native chieftains of those of their countrymen nearer the pale who had taken for some time to performing that commercial transaction. The neophytes of feudal law would then explain that in case of extension of the English conquest, their possession of the land would be guaranteed by the fact of the new title. What they took great care should not be discovered by the clan, was that they gave what did not belong to them, and sold the collective property of their followers, to receive it afterwards at the hands of the English as personal property.... This was seen clearly later on, when they began to sell it or raise mortgages on it. But that, the dawn of a gigantic fraud, nobody in Ireland could so much as suspect. The fraudulent origin of individual appropriation is nevertheless, even to our own day, the true root of the desperate resistance that the Irish tenant invariably opposes to eviction. Be it tradition, be it “cellular memory,” he is conscious of his primordial and superior right to that glebe once stolen from his forefathers. * * * * * Stolen! if only it had been stolen once for all!... But to repeat Fitzgibbon’s (Lord Clare) saying, there is not in the whole of Ireland one field that has not been _at least three times_ unjustly taken from its legitimate possessors. And that spoliation was always accompanied by the most aggravating circumstances.