"Whosoever, be it a private individual or a people, does not obey their decree, is excluded from the sacred rites. This among them is a penalty of extreme severity. Those who are under this ban are classed among the impious and the criminal. All men abandon their society and shun their approach and conversation, lest they may suffer harm from contagion with them. When such men seek their legal right it is not rendered to them. When they seek any public office, it is not conferred on them." Mr. Orpen's comment on this passage is concise. "It was," he says, "the primitive boycott." The analogy which he thus brings down to date appears incomplete. If a man having a credit balance at the bank draws a cheque within the amount, he seeks a legal right. If that right is not rendered to him, there is something more than a boycott. Complete divestment of legal rights is not boycotting, it is attainder. It goes a long way beyond the greatest excesses of social ostracism that have been charged against the Land League or the Primrose League. Mr. Orpen is not satisfied with this exposure of Celtic law at long and at large in his first volume. He repeats it in somewhat varied phrases in the second. Now mark how plain a tale shall put him down. In his search for this particular plum of the Celtophobe, he has travelled to the sixth book and thirteenth chapter of Cæsar's history. Mr. Orpen's historical method is identical with one of which I have had later experience, when I have seen the file of a periodical presented to the tribunal with a sentence here and a paragraph there marked by the blue pencil of a Crown Prosecutor. There is a first book in Cæsar's Gallic War. It comes before the sixth book. The first episode related in the first book is doubtless familiar to Mr. Orpen since his school days, if the exigencies of the historical indictment of a nation have not compelled him to forget it. Let us recall that first episode of the Gallic War, bearing in mind all the time the doctrine that under Celtic law there were no crimes against the State, no sanction or penalty for breaches of the law except payments in composition, and no machinery for enforcing obedience.