From The Historic Case for Irish Independence by Darrell Figgis
3. The National Polity was based, from the third century onwards, upon a number of petty states.
Each of these was a political unit of the State, and an economic and deliberative unit in itself. Its affairs were led by a king, or ruler, elected by the vote of its people and removable by that vote. The land it occupied was vested in itself for the use of its freemen, and could not be alienated. The people were themselves, in fact, supreme; in a fellowship based on the land; and met in the assembly of each petty state, to legislate for so much of the law as had local application, and to hear and approve the law coordinated in the National Assembly. They dispensed hospitality for all comers. They maintained schools, at which scholars were welcomed, without payment, from all parts of Europe. They endowed their hereditary poets, scholars, historians, lawyers, and, after the introduction of Christianity in the fourth century, ecclesiastics, setting lands aside for their maintenance. And by the middle of the first millenium an elaborate polity appeared in Ireland, complete in its parts and well-devised as a whole, having grown, not by hazard, but by thought and labour of experiment--embodying a civilisation of great beauty, sprung from its own roots and distinguished throughout Europe.
Truelove's Journal: A Bookshop Novella
From a sad, comfortless childhood Giles Truelove developed into a reclusive and uncommunicative man whose sole passion was books. For so long they were the only meaning to his existence. But when fate eventually intervened to have the outside world intrude upon his life, he began to discover emotions that he never knew he had.
This is a story for the genuine booklover, penned by an Irish bookseller under the pseudonym of Ralph St. John Featherstonehaugh.
Annals of the Famine in Ireland
Annals of the Famine in Ireland, by Asenath Nicholson, still has the power to shock and sadden even though the events described are ever-receding further into the past. When you read, for example, of the poor widowed mother who was caught trying to salvage a few potatoes from her landlord's field, and what the magistrate discovered in the pot in her cabin, you cannot help but be appalled and distressed.
The ebook is available for download in .mobi (Kindle), .epub (iBooks, etc.) and .pdf formats. For further information on the book and author see details ».
Ireland's Welcome to the Stranger
This book, the prequel to Annals of the Famine in Ireland cannot be recommended highly enough to those interested in Irish social history. The author, Mrs Asenath Nicholson, travelled from her native America to assess the condition of the poor in Ireland during the mid 1840s. Refusing the luxury of hotels and first class travel, she stayed at a variety of lodging-houses, and even in the crude cabins of the very poorest. Not to be missed!
The ebook is available for download in .mobi (Kindle), .epub (iBooks, etc.) and .pdf formats. For further information on the book and author see details ».
Henry Ford Jones' book, first published in 1915 by Princeton University, is a classic in its field. It covers the history of the Scotch-Irish from the first settlement in Ulster to the American Revolutionary period and the foundation of the country.
The ebook is available for download in .mobi (Kindle), .epub (iBooks, etc.) and .pdf formats. For further information on the book and author see details ».
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