intellectual activity.

The declared objects of the League--- the popularising of the national
language and literature--do not convey, perhaps, an adequate conception
of its actual work, or of the causes of its popularity. It seeks to
develop the intellectual, moral, and social life of the Irish people
from within, and it is doing excellent work in the cause of temperance.
Its president, Dr. Douglas Hyde, in his evidence given before the
University Commission,[29] pointed out that the success of the League
was due to its meeting the people half way; that it educated them by
giving them something which they could appreciate and assimilate; and
that it afforded a proof that people who would not respond to alien
educational systems, will respond with eagerness to something they can
call their own. The national factor in Ireland has been studiously
eliminated from national education, and Ireland is perhaps the only
country in Europe where it was part of the settled policy of those, who
had the guidance of education to ignore the literature, history, arts,
and traditions of the people. It was a fatal policy, for it obviously
tended to stamp their native country in the eyes of Irishmen with the
badge of inferiority and to extinguish the sense of healthy self-respect
which comes from the consciousness of high national ancestry and
traditions. This policy, rigidly adhered to for many years, almost
extinguished native culture among Irishmen, but it did not succeed in
making another form of culture acceptable to them. It dulled the
intelligence of the people, impaired their interest in their own
surroundings, stimulated emigration by teaching them to look on other
countries as more agreeable places to live in, and made Ireland almost a
social desert. Men and women without culture or knowledge of literature
or of music have succeeded a former generation who were passionately
interested in these things, an interest which extended down even to the
wayside cabin. The loss of these elevating influences in Irish society
probably accounts for much of the arid nature of Irish controversies,
while the reaction against their suppression has given rise to those
displays of rhetorical patriotism for which the Irish language has found
the expressive term _raimeis_, and which (thanks largely to the Gaelic
movement) most people now listen to with a painful and half-ashamed
sense of their unreality.

The Gaelic movement has brought to the surf