ur existence." It is curious that those
who most fear West Britainism have so eagerly consented to imposing upon
the Irish race what, according to Jubainville, who in common with all the
great scholars of the continent, seems to regret it very much, is "the
form of our thoughts during every instant of our existence."

So much for the greatest stroke of all in our Anglicisation, the loss of
our language. I have often heard people thank God that if the English gave
us nothing else they gave us at least their language. In this way they
put a bold face upon the matter, and pretend that the Irish language is
not worth knowing, and has no literature. But the Irish language _is_
worth knowing, or why would the greatest philologists of Germany, France,
and Italy be emulously studying it, and it _does_ possess a literature, or
why would a German savant have made the calculation that the books written
in Irish between the eleventh and seventeenth centuries, and still extant,
would fill a thousand octavo volumes.

I have no hesitation at all in saying that every Irish-feeling Irishman,
who hates the reproach of West-Britonism, should set himself to encourage
the efforts which are being made to keep alive our once great national
tongue. The losing of it is our greatest blow, and the sorest stroke that
the rapid Anglicisation of Ireland has inflicted upon us. In order to
de-Anglicise ourselves we must at once arrest the decay of the language.
We must bring pressure upon our politicians not to snuff it out by their
tacit discouragement merely because they do not happen themselves to
understand it. We must arouse some spark of patriotic inspiration among
the peasantry who still use the language, and put an end to the shameful
state of feeling--a thousand-tongued reproach to our leaders and
statesmen--which makes young men and women blush and hang their heads when
overheard speaking their own language.[19] Maynooth has at last come
splendidly to the front, and it is now incumbent upon every clerical
student to attend lectures in the Irish language and history during the
first three years of his course. But in order to keep the Irish language
alive where it is still spoken--which is the utmost we can at present
aspire to--nothing less than a house-to-house visitation and exhortation
of the people themselves will do, something--though with a very different
purpose--analogous to the procedure that James Stephens adopted throughout
Ireland