Many of my political friends cannot believe—­and I am afraid that nothing that I can say will make them believe—­that the movement is not necessarily, in the political sense, separatist in its sentiment.  This impression is, in my opinion, founded on a complete misunderstanding of Anglo-Irish history.  Those who look askance at the rise of the Gaelic movement ignore the important fact that there has never been any essential opposition between the English connection and Irish nationality.  The Elizabethan chiefs of the sixteenth and the Gaelic poets of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the relations between the two countries were far worse than they are to-day, knew nothing of this opposition.  The true sentiment of nationality is a priceless heritage of every small nation which has done great things, and had it not largely perished in Ireland, separatist sentiment, the offspring, not of Irish nationality, but of Irish political nationalism, could hardly have survived until to-day.

But undoubtedly we strike here on a danger to the Gaelic movement, so far at least as that movement is bound up with the future of the Gaelic League; a danger which cannot be left out of account in any estimate of this new force in Irish life.  The continuance of the League as a beneficent force, or indeed a force at all, seems to me, as in the case of the co-operative organisation to which I have compared it, to be vitally dependent on a scrupulous observance of that part of its constitution which keeps the door open to Irishmen of every creed or political party.  Only thus can the League remain a truly national body, and attract from all classes Irishmen who are capable of forwarding its true policy.  I do not think there is much danger of a spirit of sectarian exclusiveness developing itself in a body mainly composed of Roman Catholics whose President is a Protestant.  But it cannot be denied that there has been an occasional tendency to interpret the ’no politics’ clause of the constitution in a manner which seems hardly fair to Unionists or even to constitutional Home Rulers who may have joined the organisation on the strength of its declaration of political neutrality.  If this is not a mere transitory phenomenon its effect will be serious.  As a political body the League would immediately sink into insignificance and probably disappear amid a crowd of contending factions.  It would certainly cease to fulfil its great function of creating a nationality of the thought and spirit, in which all Irishmen who wish to be anything else than English colonists might aspire to share.  Its early successes in bringing together men of different political views were remarkable.  At the very outset of its career it enlisted the support of so militant a politician as the late Rev. R.R.  Kane, who declared that though a Unionist and an Orangeman he had no desire to forget that he was an O’Cahan.  On this basis it is difficult to set a limit to the fruitfulness of the work which this organisation might do for Ireland, and I cannot regard any who would depart from the letter and spirit of its constitution as sincere, or if sincere as wise, friends of the movement with which they are associated.