sporadic raids and successive risings. A race of military outlaws was
fashioned, which accounts for much in Irish character today.
Previously the Irish, like all Celtic civilization, was founded on
the arts, on speech, and on law, rather than on war and feudalism.

Even Irish militancy was crushed in the Williamite wars, and the
race, deprived of its original subsistence as well as of its acquired
defense, sank into the stupor of penal times. Those who should have
been leaders of Ireland became marshals of Austria and France.

Gradually it was learnt that the pen is mightier than the sword and
the human voice more potent than the sound of cannon--and the
constitutional struggle developed, not without relapse and reverse.
To Dean Swift must be attributed the change in the national weapon
and the initiation of a leadership of resistance within the law,
which has lasted into modern times. Accident made Swift an Irishman,
and a chance attempt to circulate debased coins in Ireland for the
benefit of a debased but royal favorite made him a patriot. Swift
drove out Wood's halfpence at the pen-point. He shamed the
government, he checked the all-powerful Walpole, and he roused the
manhood of Ireland towards independence in legislation. He never
realized what a position history would give him. To himself he seemed
a gloomy failure, to his contemporaries a popular pamphleteer, but to
posterity he is the creator of public conscience in Ireland. He was
the father of patriotic journalism, and the first to defend Ireland's
rights through literature. Though his popularity was quenched in
lunacy, his impress upon Irish politics remains as powerful and
lasting as upon English literature.

Within the so-called Irish parliament sprang forth the first of a
long line of orators, Henry Flood. He was the first to study the
Constitution for purposes of opposition. He attacked vice-regal
government in its own audit-house. Pension and corruption he laid
bare, and upon the people he breathed a spirit of independence.
Unfortunately he was not content with personal prominence. He
accepted office, hoping thereby to benefit Ireland. His voice became
lost to the higher cause, and another man rose in his stead, Henry
Grattan. The American war tested the rival champions of Liberty.
Flood favored sending Irish troops, "armed negotiators" he called
them, to deal with the revolted colonists. Grattan nobly reviled him
for standing--"with a metaphor in hi