So for the State itself, as an organisation. Its faults we have seen; but, even so, it found as wise a balance as any nation has yet found between a centralised and a decentralised system. Authority, to be sure, depended a good deal from the personality of whoever exercised it; but then history has shewn that this was not an attribute exclusively monopolised by the Irish State. In the last resort, not only in the theory but in the practice and working of the State, that authority was based on a free people. The State’s only property, and the final source of all its wealth, the land, was owned by the people in corporate stateships; and those corporate stateships had its assemblies of freemen which discussed and adjudicated its affairs. The national life was one of high ideals--of Art; of physical and mental aristocracy; it held in high esteem its intellectual leaders; it prized its scholarship--but these ideals were rooted in the possession and husbandry of the soil. The student will need to search well before he betters the Irish State; and the more truly he search the more deeply he will wonder at the strange tragedy that it should have been hindered at a critical hour of its development. FOOTNOTE: [1] A parallel instance may serve to show how the working of the State, taken at a moment of indecision, was turned against itself. In the fifteenth century England was plunged into a dynastic war. Those who have read the documents of the time will know with what perfidy that war was marked. The English barons openly sold their swords to the highest bidder as a natural thing. Treachery and insecurity were rife on every hand. Now, if an enemy had invaded England at that moment, and had been willing to pay the extra prices that would have been demanded of a foreigner, and, where this was not possible, had turned passion and party strength against passion and party strength, taking care to balance the contending forces evenly, such an enemy could have entrenched himself in the country, and in the course of time have defied ejectment. England was spared this misfortune; Ireland was not. V. THE BROKEN STATE.