ards the
Gaelic League found expression in Dr. Mahaffy, one of its most
distinguished scholars, who, having failed to kill the movement with
ridicule, changed his line and declared that the revival of Gaelic would
be unreasonable and dishonest if it were not impossible.

In spite of this, the success of the League, which was only established
in 1893, is astonishing. In 1900 it consisted of 120 branches; to-day
there are more than 1,000. The circulation of Gaelic books published
under its auspices is over 200,000 a year. In the year 1899 it was
taught in 100 Primary Schools, it is now taught in 3,000.

The number of people, including adults, learning Irish in evening
continuation classes was in 1899 little over 1,000, and is to-day over
100,000.

The circumstance that in London on the Sunday nearest St. Patrick's Day
a service with Gaelic hymns and a Gaelic sermon is conducted every year,
and has been conducted for the last three years, at the Cathedral at
Westminster, and is attended by 6,000 or 7,000 Irish people, and that
last year Dr. Alexander held a Gaelic service in a Protestant Cathedral
in Dublin, should do much to show the manner in which the movement is
spreading among all classes, and to indicate that it will in time
demolish that false situation by which, for the greater part of the
Continent, Ireland has been looked upon as merely an island on the other
side of England to be seen through English glasses.

That strange recuperative power which the country has evinced at
intervals in her history is, without a doubt, once again asserting
itself, and a new spirit of restlessness and of effort, which in no
sense can be supposed to supplant, or to do more than to supplement,
political aspirations, is making itself felt.

It is doing so in a number of different directions, but the ultimate aim
of all the forces which are at work may be said to be, in a cant phrase,
to make it as much an object to desire to live in the country as
hitherto it has been to die for it.

The inculcation of a spirit of self-reliance, the discouragement among
the poorer classes of the notion that emigration is an object at which
one should aim, the destruction among the richer of that spirit which is
known at "West British," and which implies an apologetic air on the part
of its owner for being Irish at all, these are among the effects of the
new movement.

The desire to see Ireland Irish, and not a burlesque of what is English,