is its _raison d'etre_, and that it has made progress along the lines
mapped out, the Gaelic League, from which it gains its driving force,
the literary revival, and the movement for industrial development bear
ample witness.

From the impression made by a few wits, English people have jumped to
the conclusion that as a people we are specially blessed with a sense of
humour, a curious _non sequitur_ which the restraint, consciously or
unconsciously inculcated by the Gaelic League, is likely to make more
apparent, for it is killing that conception of the Irishman as typically
a boisterous buffoon with intervals of maudlin sentimentality which the
stage and the popular song have so long been content to depict without
protest from us, and which left Englishmen with feelings not more
exalted than those of their sixteenth and seventeenth century ancestors,
to whom "mere Irish" was a term of opprobrium.

In their appeals to sentiment, Englishmen have not been more successful.
The appointment of Mr. Wyndham to the Irish Office was hailed by them as
a certain success on the ground of his descent from Lord Edward
Fitzgerald, a traitor, on their own showing, descent from whom one would
have thought should have been rather concealed than advertised. They
waxed sentimental over the bravery of the Irish soldiers in the South
African war, among which the achievements of the Inniskillings at
Pieter's Hill and the Connaught Rangers at Colenso were only surpassed
by the Dublin Fusiliers at Talana Hill, out of a thousand of whom only
three hundred survived. But the strange thing was that while English
people in honour of these men wore shamrock on St. Patrick's Day, just
as in the case of the Crimea, the sympathy of their own country was not
on the side upon which they fought, and the people of their country
looked upon the Irish soldiers as _condottieri_ fighting in an alien
cause. One cannot draw up an indictment against a whole nation, and if
this be treason in the opinion of Englishmen, one can only reply that to
commit the unpardonable sin against the body politic there must be
something more on the part of a people than a continuance of feelings
towards a state of affairs against which they have always protested, and
in which they have never acquiesced.

Historically we have been the home of lost causes, and the fact that so
many of the national heroes of Ireland have ended their lives in failure
has had no small effect in bringi