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APPENDICES
APPENDIX A
THE ENGLISH SLAVE POPULATION IN IRELAND
THE relative positions of the Irish and English peoples
in respect to education, commerce, wealth and
civilized development, are indicated more clearly
than through any other criterion by the large English
slave population in Ireland. Slaves were numerous in
medieval Ireland and the subject is worth dwelling
upon, for English historians have shrouded the facts in
a disguise of specious phrases most of these slaves were
English men and women, English boys and girls, traded
for export to slave dealers in English ports by their own
degraded fathers and mothers and other more powerful
relatives.
There is little testimony more conclusive of Ireland's
national and social prestige in those ages than the fact
that while foreign slaves, and particularly English slaves,
were so plentiful in the island, there is no record of Irishmen
being traded as slaves either in Britain or on the Con-
tinent. That Irishmen should always have been the purchasers
and never the purchased in this traffic of human
merchandise, which naturally represented then as in other
ages the most valuable of personal property,
reveals to
us in convincing fashion the enormous width of the gulf,
indicated in many other directions, that separated the
immemorial Irish nation from the welter of tribes on
the other side of the channel.
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