Whoever fought or conquered, they were always the victims; and it is a singular fact that their sufferings are scarcely ever noticed by the contemporary annalists, even when those annalists were ecclesiastics.

The extent to which they were slaughtered in the perpetual wars between the native chiefs, and in the wars between those chiefs and the English, is something awful to contemplate, not to speak of the wholesale destruction of life by the famines which those wars entailed.

On several occasions the Celtic race seemed very nearly extinct.

The penal code, with all its malign influence, had one good effect.

It subdued to a great extent the fighting propensities of the people, and fused the clans into one nation, purified by suffering.