A DISTINCTION. Ireland having been a self-ruled country for a stretch
of some two thousand years, then violently brought under subjection
to foreign rule, regaining legislative independence for a brief
period toward the close of the eighteenth century, then by violence
and corruption deprived of that independence and again brought under
the same foreign rule, to which it is still subject, the expression
"Law in Ireland" comprises the native and the foreign, the laws
devised by the Irish Nation for its own governance and the laws
imposed upon it from without: two sets, codes, or systems proper to
two entirely distinct social structures having no relation and but
little resemblance to each other. Whatever may be thought of either
as law, the former is Irish in every sense, and vastly the more
interesting historically, archaeologically, philologically, and in
many other ways; the latter being English law in Ireland, and not
truly Irish in any sense.

ORIGIN AND CHARACTER OF IRISH LAW. _Seanchus agus Féineachus na
hEireann_ == _Hiberniae Antiquitates et Sanctiones Legales_--The
Ancient Laws and Decisions of the _Féini_, of Ireland. _Sen_ or
_sean_ (pronounced shan) == "old," differs from most Gaelic
adjectives in preceding the noun it qualifies. It also tends to
coalesce and become a prefix. _Seanchus_ (shanech-us) == "ancient
law." _Féineachus_ (fainech-us) == the law of the _Féini_, who were
the Milesian farmers, free members of the clans, the most important
class in the ancient Irish community. Their laws were composed in
their contemporary language, the _Bearla Féini_, a distinct form of
Gaelic. Several nations of the Aryan race are known to have cast into
metre or rhythmical prose their laws and such other knowledge as they
desired to communicate, preserve, and transmit, before writing came
into use. The Irish went further and, for greater facility in