Ireland, at the earliest period of which we have any knowledge, contained like Britain, a dark and a fair stock, which, there is every reason to believe, were identical with the dark and the fair stocks of Britain.  When the Irish first became known they spoke a Gaelic dialect, and though, for many centuries, Scandinavians made continual incursions upon, and settlements among them, the Teutonic languages made no more way among the Irish than they did among the French.  How much Scandinavian blood was introduced there is no evidence to show.  But after the conquest of Ireland by Henry II., the English people, consisting in part of the descendants of Cymric speakers, and in part of the descendants of Teutonic speakers, made good their footing in the eastern half of the island, as the Saxons and Danes made good theirs in England; and did their best to complete the parallel by attempting the extirpation of the Gaelic-speaking Irish.  And they succeeded to a considerable extent; a large part of Eastern Ireland is now peopled by men who are substantially English by descent, and the English language has spread over the land far beyond the limits of English blood.

Ethnologically, the Irish people were originally, like the people of Britain, a mixture of Melanochroi and Xanthochroi.  They resembled the Britons in speaking a Celtic tongue; but it was a Gaelic and not a Cymric form of the Celtic language.  Ireland was untouched by the Roman conquest, nor do the Saxons seem to have had any influence upon her destinies, but the Danes and Norsemen poured in a contingent of Teutonism, which has been largely supplemented by English and Scotch efforts.

What, then, is the value of the ethnological difference between the Englishman of the western half of England and the Irishman of the eastern half of Ireland?  For what reason does the one deserve the name of a “Celt,” and not the other?  And further, if we turn to the inhabitants of the western half of Ireland, why should the term “Celts” be applied to them more than to the inhabitants of Cornwall?  And if the name is applicable to the one as justly as to the other, why should not intelligence, perseverance, thrift, industry, sobriety, respect for law, be admitted to be Celtic virtues?  And why should we not seek for the cause of their absence in something else than the idle pretext of “Celtic blood?”

I have been unable to meet with any answers to these questions.

V. The Celtic and the Teutonic dialects are members of the same great Aryan family of languages; but there is evidence to show that a non-Aryan language was at one time spoken over a large extent of the area occupied by Melanochroi in Europe.