said of it:  “The Gaelic League will be recognised in history as the most revolutionary influence that ever came into Ireland.”  It saved the soul of Ireland when it was in imminent danger of being lost, and its triumph was in great measure due to the fact that it held rigidly aloof from the professedly political parties, although it may be said for it that it undoubtedly laid the foundations of that school of thought which made all the later developments of nationality possible.  And the amazing thing is that the priest and the parson, the gentry and the middle classes, equally with the peasantry, vied with each other in extending the influence and power of the movement.  One of its strongest supporters was a leader of the Belfast Orangemen, the late Dr Kane, who observed that though he was a Unionist and a Protestant he did not forget that he had sprung from the Clan O’Cahan.  The stimulation given to national thought and purpose spread in many directions.  A new race of Irish priests was being educated on more thoroughly Irish lines, and they went forth to their duties with the inspiration, as it were, of a new call.  A crusade was started against emigration, which was fast draining the country of its reserves of brain, brawn and beauty.  The dullness of the country-side, an important factor in forcing the young and adventurous abroad, was relieved by the new enthusiasm for Irish games and pastimes and recreations—­for the seanchus, the sgoruidheacht, the ceilidhe and the Feiseanna.

In giving to the young especially a new pride in their country and in their own, great and distinctive national heritage, it did a great deal to strengthen the national character and to make it more independent and self-reliant.  It started the great work of rooting out the slavery which centuries of dependency and subjection had bred into the marrow of the race.  Mr Arthur Griffith has admitted that the present generation could never have effected this work had not Parnell and his generation done their brave labour before them, but considered in themselves the achievements of the Gaelic League can only be described as mighty both in the actual revolution it wrought in the moral, intellectual and spiritual sphere, in the reaction it created against the coarser materialism of imported modes and manners, and in the new spirit which it breathed into the entire people.

Coincident with the foundation of the Gaelic League, other regenerative influences were also at work.  These aimed at the economic reconstruction and the industrial development of the country by the inculcation of the principles of self-help, self-reliance and co-operation, and by the wider dissemination of technical instruction and agricultural education.  Ireland, by reason, I suppose, of its condition, its arrested development and its psychology, is a country much given to “new movements,” most of which have a very brief existence.  They are born but