He was not admitted if, in his flight, his foot had broken a single withered branch. Neither could he pass muster “unless he could jump over a branch of a tree as high as his forehead, and could stoop under one as low as his knee, through the agility of his body.” He was rejected, also, if he failed “to pluck a thorn out of his heel with his hand without stopping in his course.” Each member, before being admitted to the Order, was obliged to swear fidelity and homage to the Righ-Feinnedh (Ree-Feena) or king of the Fenians, which is the English translation of the title. There were also other military bodies—not forgetting the more ancient “Red Branch Knights,” whom Moore has immortalized in one of his finest lyrics, but the Fenians and their redoubtable chief hold the foremost place of fame in Irish national annals. It would seem that a kind of loose federal compact existed, from time to time, between the High King and the other monarchs, but, unfortunately, there does not appear to have been a very strong or permanent bond of union, and this fatal defect in the Irish Constitution of pre-Norman times led to innumerable disputes about succession to the Ard-Righship and endless civil wars, which eventually wrecked the national strength and made the country the comparatively easy prey of adventurous and ambitious foreigners. The monarchical system was, in itself, faulty. Where a monarchy exists at all, the succession should be so regulated that the lineal heir, according to primogeniture, whether a minor or not, must succeed to the throne, except when the succession is, for some good and sufficient reason, set aside by the legislative body of the nation. This was done in England in the case of Henry IV, who, with the consent of Parliament, usurped the crown of Richard II; and also in the case of William and Mary, who were selected by the British Parliament of their day to supplant James II, the father-in-law and uncle of the former and father of the latter. The act of settlement and succession, passed in 1701, ignored the male line of the Stuarts, chiefly because it was Catholic, and placed the succession to the throne, failing issue of William and Mary and Anne, another daughter of the deposed King James, in a younger, Protestant branch of the female line of Stuart—the House of Hanover-Brunswick—which now wears the British crown. But, in general, as far as the question of monarchy is concerned, the direct system of succession has proven most satisfactory, and has frequently prevented confusion of title and consequent civil war. We can recall only one highly important occasion when it provoked that evil—the sanguinary thirty years’ feud between the kindred royal English, or, rather, Norman-French, Houses of York and Lancaster. Even in that case the quarrel arose from the original bad title of Henry IV, who was far from being the lineal heir to the throne. Our own democratic system of choosing a chief ruler is, no doubt, best of all.