roof of our idleness and incapacity. What wonder that we
felt ourselves outraged and wronged and bullied? Huge demonstrations
of protest were held in all parts of the country. These were attended
by men of all sects and of every political hue. Nationalist and
Unionist, landlord and tenant, Protestant and Catholic stood on the
same platform and vied with each other in denunciation of the common
robber. At Cork Lord Castletown recalled the Boston Tea riots. At
Limerick Lord Dunraven presided at a meeting which was addressed by
the Most Rev. Dr O'Dwyer, the Catholic bishop of the diocese, and by
Mr John Daly, a Fenian who had spent almost a lifetime in prison to
expiate his nationality.

There was a general forgetfulness of quarrels and differences whilst
this ferment of truly national indignation lasted. But the cohesive
materials were not sound enough to make it a lasting union of the
whole people. There were still class fights to be fought to their
appointed end, and so the agitation gradually filtered out, and
Ireland remains to-day still groaning under the intolerable burden of
overtaxation, not lessened, but enormously increased, by a war which
Ireland claims was none of her business.

The subsidence of the political fever from 1891 to 1898 was not
without its compensations in other directions. Ireland had time to
think of other things, to enter into a sort of spiritual retreat--to
wonder whether if, after all, politics were everything, whether the
exclusive pursuit of them did not mean that other vital factors in the
national life were forgotten, and whether the attainment of material
ambitions might not be purchased at too great a sacrifice--at the loss
of those spiritual and moral forces without which no nation can be
either great or good in the best sense. There was much to be done in
this direction. The iron of slavery had very nearly entered our souls.
Centuries of landlord oppression, of starvation, duplicity and
Anglicisation had very nearly destroyed whatever there was of moral
virtue and moral worth in our nature. The Irish language--our
distinctive badge of nationhood--had almost died upon the lips of the
people. The old Gaelic traditions and pastimes were fast fading away.
Had these gone we might, indeed, win Home Rule, but we would have lost
things immeasurably greater, for "not by bread alone doth man
live"--we would have lost that independence of the soul, that moral
grandeur, that intellectual disti