well established,--as by
centuries of national greatness and power,--all sorts of waves of
outer circumstance may roll over the race, and apparently wash
its raciality clean away; and yet something in the unseen
operates to resist, and, when the waves recede, to raise up first
the old race-consciousness, and finally national existence again.
Take Ireland for example. It has been over-run and over-run so
much that many authorities would deny the existence of any Celtic
blood there at all. But what is absolutely undeniable is that a
distinct and well-defined racial type exists there; and that it
corresponds largely to the racial type--I do not mean physical so
much as spiritual,--that the Greek and Roman writers ascribed to
the Celtic Gauls. It is often claimed that an Irishman is merely
an inferior kind of Englishman, and that there is little
difference in blood between the two; but those who make this
claim most loudly would not dream of denying the difference of
the mental types; they are generally the ones who see most
difference. Why was it that the children of the Norman invaders
of Ireland became _Hiberniores ipsis Hiberniis?_ Because of the
astral mold, certainly. It is race-consciousness that makes
race, and not the other way; and there is something behind that
makes race-consciousness; so that even where calamity has
smashed up the latter and put it altogether in abeyance, the
seeds of it remain, in the soil and on the inner planes, to
sprout again in their day; when the Crest-Wave rolls in; when
Souls come to revive them. It may be that this will never
happen, of course; but it seems to me that where Nature wishes
to put an end to these racial recrudescences, she must take
strong steps.

Though the British Celts had been under Roman rule for four
centuries, their language today is Celtic.--Why?--Because there
was what you may call a very old, well-established and strong
Celtic-speaking astral mold. We absorbed a large number of Latin
words; but assimilated them to the Celtic mold so that you would
never recognise them; whereas in a page of English the Latin
borrowings stand out by the score. Look at that _ascend,_ for
instance: Latin _ascendere_ parading itself naked and unashamed,
and making no pretense whatever to be anything else. You shall
find _ascendere,_ too, on any page of Welsh; or rather, you
shall not find him, by reason of his skillful camouflage. He has
cut off his train, as in Engl