the folly of this "revival of
the Irish language" would be past belief. The language of Shakespeare
and Milton, of Gibbon and Macaulay, ought surely to be good enough for
ordinary people; and it must be obvious to every reasoning being that
at the present moment of the world's history, English is one of the
most useful languages in existence. It is spoken by 40,000,000 of
people in Europe and twice that number in America, not to mention
Australasia and South Africa. It is the language of commerce, of
science, and of a vast amount of literature. Europeans of various
nationalities learn it, for the sake of its convenience; although, as
we all know, one of the difficulties of modern life is that boys and
girls have too much to study; educationalists everywhere complain
that the curriculum is overloaded. Its position in Ireland can be
seen exactly by the census returns; for the papers contain a "language
column," each person being required to state whether he speaks
English or Irish or both. According to the returns of 1891, the total
population was in round numbers 4,725,000; of whom 4,037,000 spoke
English only, 643,000 both languages, and 44,000 Irish only. And that
trifling minority existed only in certain localities, and was confined
to the less educated classes. The only counties in which a majority of
the population spoke Irish (including those who spoke both languages)
were Mayo and Galway. Yet now it is solemnly said that Ireland,
being an independent nation, must have a language of its own; even in
counties where no language but English has been spoken for centuries,
and where probably none of the ancestors of the present population
ever spoke any other language, Irish is being taught in the Roman
Catholic primary schools, and the unhappy children who might be
studying arithmetic or elementary geography, are wasting their time
over a totally useless language. I say "totally useless" deliberately;
for the arguments usually brought forward in favour of the study,
apart from the political one--that Irish is of use in the study of
philology, and that the MSS. of centuries ago contain fine specimens
of poetry--are too absurd to be worth discussing. The real object of
the Nationalists in "encouraging the revival of the Irish language"
is clearly set out in the following words of T. MacSeamus in a recent
number of the _Irish Review_:--

"Most important of all, the Irish language is one of the
things that distin