We would desire to ask Mr. Dunlop for the exact proof he relies on for any one of these statements, beginning perhaps with “no law outside the _customs of the tribe_.” Writers who hold Ireland to be, as he says, “a sort of scrap-heap for Europe,” and who cannot conceive of medieval Irishmen as ordinary men sharing the faults and virtues of other white Europeans, are addicted to the word “native”--a word not in common use among historians for Englishmen in England in the Middle Ages, but affected by them to indicate Irishmen in Ireland, with the derogatory sense which their “tradition” requires. The vulgar view received as it were official recognition half a century ago from Mr. Hamilton in his preface to the _State Papers_ of 1509-73 (see also references in my book, 487-8), where he explains that the study of Irish life till Elizabethan times will be of considerable value in the study of _Universal History_, Ireland being so remote from the earlier seats of civilisation that the rude way of living described by Hesiod and the old poets still lingered there till the sixteenth century; till which time “most of the wild Irish led a nomade life, tending cattle, sowing little corn, and rarely building houses, but sheltered alike from heat and cold, and moist and dry, by the Irish cloak.” The last fifty years, we see, amid the general shaking of dry bones and the movement of history elsewhere, have brought no stir in Irish history. That alone stands like eternal truth fixed and unchangeable. Hence, doubtless, Mr. Dunlop’s canon (_Quart. Rev._, 1906) forbidding “_a history of Ireland in more than one volume_.” The barbarian legend has got a long start. A first attempt to review its evidence was made in my book. In a series of social studies I have endeavoured to discuss, not the whole of Irish history, but definite matters of trade, social life, and education. I have gathered a body of facts which indicate that Ireland had considerable manufactures; that her foreign commerce can be traced throughout Europe; that there was an orderly society, even a wealthy one; that Irish travellers were known at Rome and in the Levant; that there was an Anglo-Irish culture by no means contemptible, in touch with Continental learning; and that increasing intercourse of the races did not tend to barbarism but to civilisation.