in his
"Pot of Broth."--How beautifully W. G. Fay interpreted an Irish laughter
which had no bitterness in it.

But the strong intellectual movement which has swept over Ireland has
been both embittering and embittered. These last five and twenty years
have been the most formative in the country's history of any since
Ireland became the composite nation that she now is, or, perhaps, has
yet to become. At the back of it all lies the great social change
involved in the transfer of ownership from the landlord to the
cultivators of the soil--a change which has literally disenserfed
three-fourths of Ireland's people. Yet the relations are obscure,
indefinite, and intangible, which unite that material result to the
outcome of two forces, allied but distinct, which have operated solely
on men's minds and spirits. These are, of course, the Gaelic revival and
the whole literary movement which has had its most concrete expression
in the Irish theatre, and its most potent inspiration in the personality
of Mr. Yeats.

Of these two forces, one can show by far the more tangible effects, for
the Gaelic League has issued in action. Setting out to revive and save
the Irish language as a living speech, the instrument of a nation's
intercourse, it has failed of its purpose; but it has revived and
rendered potent the principle of separation. Nationalist, it will have
nothing to do with a nationality that is not as plainly marked off from
other nationalities as a red lamp from a green lamp; and the essential
symbol of separate nationality is for orthodox Gaelic Leaguers a
separate language. America, said an able exponent of this doctrine the
other day in a public debate, will never and never can be a nation till
its language is no longer recognisable as English--till its English
differs as much from the language of England as German differs from
Dutch. An inevitable corollary to this view is the necessity for
complete political separation from Great Britain--if only to provide the
machinery for this complete differentiation by daily speech.

I cannot pretend to assess impartially the value of this movement. It
asserted itself in passionate deeds at a moment when many thousands of
us Nationalists were taking equally vigorous action in pursuit of a
less tribal ideal. Thousands of us lost our lives, all of us risked our
lives, with the hope of achieving a national unity which could never be
built on the basis of regarding no man as an Iris