hman who did not speak,
or at least desire to speak, Gaelic for his mother tongue. The action of
Irish soldiers was thwarted and frustrated by the action of a very few
separatists, with a very small expense to themselves in bloodshed. But
the tribute to the work of the Gaelic League is that Ireland accepted
them and rejected us. None can deny that it has been a potent stimulus
to national education; and it only lacks official prohibition by the
British Government to become more powerful still.

Whatever the outcome, I take back nothing of what is written in these
papers concerning the Gaelic revival. In a country governed against the
will of its people, forces that, under normal and healthy conditions,
would be purely beneficent, may easily grow explosive and disruptive.
Yet I have not changed my mind on a critical question which led me to
sever my connection with the work of the Gaelic League. When that body
decided to rely on compulsion rather than persuasion, it took the wrong
road, if its object was to endear the Irish language to all Ireland, and
to induce all Irishmen to cherish it as part of the common national
heritage. As a result Ulstermen have a perfect right to say that if they
accepted Home Rule, one of the first steps of an Irish government formed
under the present auspices would be to demand a knowledge of Gaelic as
the necessary qualification for holding any public office.

I do not believe that this tribal idealism which is now so potent will
endure. It is out of harmony with the world's development--a world which
in order to preserve the very principle of small nationalities, is
growing more and more international. America is not only a nation, but
is the type of the modern nation--bound together less by what it
inherits from the past, than by what it hopes from the future.

The other force which has been operating through these years is, in a
sense, obliged to give the lie to the pretensions of the Gaelic League.
Yeats and Synge have showed how completely it is possible to be Irish
while using the English language. They have accepted the fact that
Ireland to-day thinks in English, but they have endeavoured to give to
Ireland a distinctively Irish thought, coloured by the whole racial
tradition and temperament. With them has been allied a personality not
less Irish, yet less obviously Irish--"A.E.," George Russell. Between
them, these writers and thinkers have profoundly influenced the mind of
the ge