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All were happy, and industrious, and independent, for they had not then been taught that they were slaves and natural enemies groaning under the penal yoke of oppression. Their fairs and markets were equally peaceful. Neither faction-fight nor party-fight ever stained the streets with blood.
Ask Juliette Adam whether the bread-and-butter misses of France in the year 1847 did not squabble over the obstinacy of King Louis Philippe and the greed of M. Guizot, the claims of Louis Napoleon and the theories of Louis Blanc, of Odilon Barrot, and Ledru-Rollin? And I who write, have I not seen a North Antrim Sunday-school wrecked in a faction-fight between the Orange and the Green?
It was, in fact, with him that the struggle towards monarchical bureaucracy began, which was checked by the barons, who extorted Magna Charta from King John, and afterwards by the revolt headed by Simon de Montfort in Henry III.'s reign; was carried on vigorously by Edward I., and finally successfully finished by Henry VII. after the long faction-fight of the Wars of the Roses had weakened the feudal lords so much that they could no longer assert themselves against the monarchy.
Are there not stories, too, of clever little apes in tropical forests who have pelted unwary travellers with nuts, stones, and any missiles which came handy? Then, coming nearer home, there is the lady at an Irish fair who hangs on the outskirts of a faction-fight, ready to do execution with a stone in her stocking a terrible gog-magog sort of brain-scatterer.
Denis, avick machree! avick machree!* your hand was dreaded, and a good right it had, for it was the manly hand, that was ever and always raised in defence of them that wanted a friend; abroad, in the faction-fight, against the oppressor, your name was ever feared, acushla? but at home at home where was your fellow Denis, agrah, do you know the lips that's spaking to you? your young bride your heart's light Oh!
No more than that, I cried, 'for killing men? 'And is it not enough, O lord of kindness? It is not as if we had killed men from malice or desire of gain. We killed in sudden anger, or, in the case of three among us, in a faction-fight. It is from Allah; and we ask forgiveness.
The people held every year, on Whitsunday, a royal faction-fight; and for this, preparation was made almost every Sunday in the year. They fought with deadly weapons, sticks loaded with lead, and stones.
The Wars of the Roses were not a struggle of political principle; hardly even a dynastic struggle; they had their origin partly in a patriotic antagonism to the foreign queen and to her foreign councils; but they were in the main a vast faction-fight between two sections of an armed and turbulent nobility turned into buccaneers by the French wars, and, like their compeers all over Europe, bereft, by the decay of Catholicism, of the religious restraints with which their morality was bound up.
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