Had Brian lived, or had he been able to establish his dynasty, the result would, without doubt, have been achieved. Unfortunately he fell in the hour of his triumph, at the battle of Clontarf. He had broken the O’Neill succession; and the elder branch of that dynasty were the O’Conors of Connacht. Therefore for a century a triangular dynastic dispute arose between the O’Briens, the O’Neills, and the O’Conors. III. THE POLITY AND THE STATE. The polity that thus emerged consisted of a number of stateships throughout the country, each of which was a smaller reproduction of the State in which it was comprised, and each of which was a unit in the organisation of that State. Because it was a system that was competent to continue itself independently of a central authority its natural tendency was to dispense with that central authority; yet the device was such that authority, once established, was distributed from the centre down to all the branches, and was gathered from the branches up towards the centre, in a well-concerted scheme. And this proved to be the case even when the monarch was weak, independently of his personal power. A good deal of confusion has been introduced into the understanding of old history by the way in which its records were written. Europe at that time was full of wars; and Ireland was no exception. To chroniclers in a day when personal prowess counted for much it was more important to record a battle in which some famous man fell than to record the continuous social life of a community. The result is that in the records the battles seem to obliterate the social life, and plunge it into chaos. To the modern mind particularly it seems so, for the modern man knows nothing of wars save as great continental cataclysms, in which whole nations are hurled against whole nations, and all life is brought to a standstill, while death claims its daily thousands, and chivalry is displaced by venom and hatred. The modern mind must not judge of ancient days by the world’s decay. The “battles,” that the belittlers of Ireland are so eager to emphasise, as little suspended the general life of the country, seldom employed a larger hosting of men on each side, and even used few weapons more destructive, than the faction fights of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. We know, for instance, that the eleventh century, when Ireland was involved in a triangular dynastic dispute and more full of wars than at any other time, is famous for its literary activity. Historians were busy, old tales were re-written, and great books were compiled. All this, we are told, came from a soil across which wars were surging; but the result clearly shows that these wars did not suspend, or even greatly impede, the artistic, social and economic life of the Nation. It is necessary to see this, and to get a right perspective, in perceiving the life of the nation in the polity it achieved.