or taught; the names
of our rebels and martyrs blotted out; our battlefields and traditions
forgotten; the fact that we were not of Saxon origin dropped out of sight
and memory, and let me now put the question--How many Irishmen are there
who would purchase material prosperity at such a price? It is exactly
such a question as this and the answer to it that shows the difference
between the English and Irish race. Nine Englishmen out of ten would jump
to make the exchange, and I as firmly believe that nine Irishmen out of
ten would indignantly refuse it.

And yet this awful idea of complete Anglicisation, which I have here put
before you in all its crudity, is, and has been, making silent inroads
upon us for nearly a century.

Its inroads have been silent, because, had the Gaelic race perceived what
was being done, or had they been once warned of what was taking place in
their own midst, they would, I think, never have allowed it. When the
picture of complete Anglicisation is drawn for them in all its nakedness
Irish sentimentality becomes suddenly a power and refuses to surrender its
birthright.

What lies at the back of the sentiments of nationality with which the
Irish millions seem so strongly leavened, what can prompt them to applaud
such sentiments as:

"They say the British empire owes much to Irish hands,
That Irish valour fixed her flag o'er many conquered lands;
And ask if Erin takes no pride in these her gallant sons,
Her Wolseleys and her Lawrences, her Wolfes and Wellingtons.

Ah! these were of the Empire--we yield them to her fame,
And ne'er in Erin's orisons are heard their alien name;
But those for whom her heart beats high and benedictions swell,
They died upon the scaffold and they pined within the cell."

Of course it is a very composite feeling which prompts them; but I believe
that what is largely behind it is the half unconscious feeling that the
race which at one time held possession of more than half Europe, which
established itself in Greece, and burned infant Rome, is now--almost
extirpated and absorbed elsewhere--making its last stand for independence
in this island of Ireland; and do what they may the race of to-day cannot
wholly divest itself from the mantle of its own past. Through early Irish
literature, for instance, can we best form some conception of what that
race really was, which, after overthrowing and trampling on the primitive
peoples of half Europe, was itsel