breath
trembling for a moment in the air--should survive the mightiest monarch
and outlast the lives of empires. The generations who uttered them are
silent; the earth has grown over their homesteads, and forests have
decayed above their cities. Yet out of the Dead Past speaks still the
Living Voice. So, to-day, we may be illumined by the light of a star which
perished a thousand years ago.

It has been said that the history of Ireland is dismal, a chronicle of
defeats. But that is because writers generally make history a mere record
of wars. The shadow of the swordsman obscures all else. The militant
monarch or minister is always put in the foremost place and the highest
position. The pigmy on a platform looks greater than the giant in his
study--but only in the eyes of pigmies. Alexander's Empire died with him,
and his satraps shared the spoil. Aristotle's sceptre is over us still.

There is a blindness which is worse than colour-blindness in the eyes
which see physical, but which cannot perceive intellectual forces and
effects: they will record that Roman power conquered Greece, but fail to
recognise that Greek intellect conquered the conqueror. Our nation has had
its changes of fortune. It has invaded others, and been itself invaded
often--part of the penalty it paid for occupying the fairest isle of the
old world, a penalty we might still pay had not a new world opened wide
its golden gates in the West. But our defeats have not been always
disasters. What seemed to have no other end than the plunder of our wealth
has resulted in the enrichment of our literature, the dissemination of our
ideas, and the capture of the imagination of other nations. The code,
which was devised to accomplish what the most ruthless savage never
designed--the annihilation of the intellect of a most intelligent
nation--studded the Continent with that nation's colleges and gave to its
members the glory of being illustrious leaders of men in the greatest
kingdoms of the world.

Last came the great dispersal, when the descendants of those who had
taught Europe for three centuries, and generously welcomed all
scholars--now made ignorant by law--were driven from their hospitable land
by famine. They went forth, as it is said, hewers of wood and drawers of
water. In other times and places it had meant extinction as slaves under
feudal rule. But mark this!--they entered into the great family of a new
people, whose fundamental principle of Demo