ng Irelandism, Fenianism, Land Leagueism, and
Parliamentary obstruction seem always to gain their sympathy and support.
It is just because there appears no earthly chance of their becoming good
members of the Empire that I urge that they should not remain in the
anomalous position they are in, but since they absolutely refuse to become
the one thing, that they become the other; cultivate what they have
rejected, and build up an Irish nation on Irish lines.

But you ask, why should we wish to make Ireland more Celtic than it
is--why should we de-Anglicise it at all?

I answer because the Irish race is at present in a most anomalous
position, imitating England and yet apparently hating it. How can it
produce anything good in literature, art, or institutions as long as it is
actuated by motives so contradictory? Besides, I believe it is our Gaelic
past which, though the Irish race does not recognise it just at present,
is really at the bottom of the Irish heart, and prevents us becoming
citizens of the Empire, as, I think, can be easily proved.

To say that Ireland has not prospered under English rule is simply a
truism; all the world admits it, England does not deny it. But the English
retort is ready. You have not prospered, they say, because you would not
settle down contentedly, like the Scotch, and form part of the Empire.
"Twenty years of good, resolute, grandfatherly government," said a
well-known Englishman, will solve the Irish question. He possibly made the
period too short, but let us suppose this. Let us suppose for a
moment--which is impossible--that there were to arise a series of
Cromwells in England for the space of one hundred years, able
administrators of the Empire, careful rulers of Ireland, developing to the
utmost our national resources, whilst they unremittingly stamped out every
spark of national feeling, making Ireland a land of wealth and factories,
whilst they extinguished every thought and every idea that was Irish, and
left us, at last, after a hundred years of good government, fat, wealthy,
and populous, but with all our characteristics gone, with every external
that at present differentiates us from the English lost or dropped; all
our Irish names of places and people turned into English names; the Irish
language completely extinct; the O's and the Macs dropped; our Irish
intonation changed, as far as possible by English schoolmasters into
something English; our history no longer remembered