Mr. Orpen gives an extended account of Irish law, with footnotes, references, and all the apparatus of learned exposition, compelling the respect and acquiescence of the less learned reader. Irish law, he tells us, was merely consecrated custom; implying by contrast that England and Normandy were at that time in the enjoyment of codes and statute books. In Irish law, we are told, there were no crimes. No breach of the law was regarded as an offence against the common-wealth, to be punished by the executive power of the State. The State did not interfere to enforce the law among the subjects. There were, in fact, no penalties. Every offence, from homicide down to the smallest breach of the peace was, in Irish law, merely a tort, a matter for civil litigation between the offended and the offender, and capable of being settled by an assessment of damages. But what was worse still was this, that when judgment was given and the damages assessed, there was no machinery for enforcing obedience to the decree; in legal phraseology, the law had no sanction. Unpopularity, the pressure of public opinion, some sort of boycotting, furnished the only resource of making men amenable to the law and the decrees of the courts. _Credo quia impossibile!_ It was not merely in twelfth-century Ireland that this wildly absurd legal system might be discovered by Alice from Wonderland, even though Giraldus Cambrensis completely failed to make a note of it. The thing was an essential vice of Celtic barbarism, and could be found in full bloom among the Gauls of Cæsar's time. Celts are impossible people, and therefore quite capable of keeping an impossible and utterly negative system of law in full operation for twelve centuries and upwards. The child's game of playing at law-courts which Irish brehons enjoyed in the twelfth century and afterwards had amused the druids of Gaul before the Christian era; and Cæsar himself is called into the witness-box. Certain forms of mental aberration are known to be infectious, and this may explain why all the great feudal lords of Ireland were fain in time to adopt this preposterous system of Celtic law with all its apparatus. Here is what Cæsar says about the druids and their judicature: