ace sentiments and thoughts
which had been developed in Gaelic Ireland through hundreds of years,
and which no repression had been able to obliterate altogether, but
which still remained as a latent spiritual inheritance in the mind. And
now this stream, which has long run underground, has again emerged even
stronger than before, because an element of national self-consciousness
has been added at its re-emergence. A passionate conviction is gaining
ground that if Irish traditions, literature, language, art, music, and
culture are allowed to disappear, it will mean the disappearance of the
race; and that the education of the country must be nationalised if our
social, intellectual, or even our economic position is to be permanently
improved.

With this view of the Gaelic movement my own thoughts are in complete
accord. It is undeniable that the pride in country justly felt by
Englishmen, a pride developed by education and a knowledge of their
history, has had much to do with the industrial pre-eminence of England;
for the pioneers of its commerce have been often actuated as much by
patriotic motives as by the desire for gain. The education of the Irish
people has ignored the need for any such historical basis for pride or
love of country, and, for my part, I feel sure that the Gaelic League is
acting wisely in seeking to arouse such a sentiment, and to found it
mainly upon the ages of Ireland's story when Ireland was most Irish.

It is this expansion of the sentiment of nationality outside the domain
of party politics--the distinction, so to speak, between nationality and
nationalism--which is the chief characteristic of the Gaelic movement.
Nationality had come to have no meaning other than a political one, any
broader national sentiment having had little or nothing to feed upon.
During the last century the spirit of nationality has found no unworthy
expression in literature, in the writings of Ferguson, Standish O'Grady
and Yeats, which, however, have not been even remotely comparable in
popularity with the political journalism in prose and rhyme in which the
age has been so fruitful. It has never expressed itself in the arts, and
not only has Ireland no representative names in the higher regions of
art, but the national deficiency has been felt in every department of
industry into which design enters, and where national
art-characteristics have a commercial value. The national customs,
culture, and recreations which