of view.  John Bull’s language is spread everywhere, while he himself retains the most exclusive insularity.  He travels to every land and there finds his own language and his own customs.  Now it goes without saying that from this very universalization his language is corrupted and becomes vulgarized.  The idiom of Shakespeare and Milton gives place gradually to the idiom of the seaports.  Furthermore, far from isolating us, Gaelic will tend to put us in touch with the civilization of the West.  As a people Anglicised, and badly Anglicised at that, we share, and even exaggerate, the faults which I have just described.  It is Anglo-Saxon speech which isolates us, and we wish on this ground to break with it and to hold out our hand to our brothers of the continent.

But, it may be said, what a pity to dig yet another abyss between Ireland and Great Britain, for it is with the latter that our geographical position will always link us for common defense.  For, while it is true that history does not show us a single case of an empire which has not sooner or later fallen to pieces, nevertheless, whatever happens, the two islands will be necessarily forced to co-operate for the common good.  Well, let us take it that things will so fall out, and let us suppose an Anglicised Ireland called upon to face such a situation.  It would be a revolutionary Ireland, a restless Ireland, an Ireland seeking vaguely for revenge on someone, deprived of really national character, and, in a general way, suspecting England of responsibility for the disappearance from our country of everything that constitutes the idea of nationality.  And let us remark that we are no longer living in those good old times when entire nations allowed themselves to be absorbed by their conquerors.  The art of printing has changed all that.  Today a “suppressed” nation is one that will sooner or later have its revenge.  Thus let us suppose that we are destined to make political peace with England and to enter of our own accord into a Hiberno-Britannic confederation.  From our point of view, what would be the result of that arrangement?  The result would be strange.  Here again, as in the case of Home Rule, it is rather we who offer advantages to England than she who offers them to us.  Only, in this latter case, the result depends on ourselves alone.  If we die, it will be because we have wished it.  Our language is not dead; on the contrary, although not widely spread, it is in itself much more alive than English, which as a literary language is in full decay.  We may congratulate ourselves that our idiom is intact.  Our civilization is old, but it has not yet lived its full life.  If we wish, the future is ours.  And let us truly believe that that is worth while, for the race which has produced epics like those of Ossian and all that magnificent literature which has been preserved for us through the ages, the race that gave to Europe that great impulse of missionary activity which is associated with the names of Columcille, Brendan, Columbanus, and Gall, not to mention men like the famous Scotus Erigena—­that race is certainly called upon to play an important part in the modern world.  But—­let us repeat it—­it must have the wish.