last century have, like Father English, the
most unmistakably English names. In two points only was the continuity of
the Irishism of Ireland damaged. First, in the north-east of Ulster, where
the Gaelic race was expelled and the land planted with aliens, whom our
dear mother Erin, assimilative as she is, has hitherto found it difficult
to absorb, and in the ownership of the land, eight-ninths of which belongs
to people many of whom always lived, or live, abroad, and not half of whom
Ireland can be said to have assimilated.

During all this time the continuation of Erin's national life centred,
according to our way of looking at it, not so much in the Cromwellian or
Williamite landholders who sat in College Green, and governed the country,
as in the mass of the people whom Dean Swift considered might be entirely
neglected, and looked upon as hewers of wood and drawers of water; the men
who, nevertheless, constituted the real working population, and who were
living on in the hopes of better days; the men who have since made
America, and have within the last ten years proved what an important
factor they may be in wrecking or in building the British Empire. These
are the men of whom our merchants, artisans, and farmers mostly consist,
and in whose hands is to-day the making or marring of an Irish nation.
But, alas, _quantum mutatus ab illo_! What the battleaxe of the Dane, the
sword of the Norman, the wile of the Saxon were unable to perform, we have
accomplished ourselves. We have at last broken the continuity of Irish
life, and just at the moment when the Celtic race is presumably about to
largely recover possession of its own country, it finds itself deprived
and stript of its Celtic characteristics, cut off from the past, yet
scarcely in touch with the present. It has lost since the beginning of
this century almost all that connected it with the era of Cuchullain and
of Ossian, that connected it with the Christianisers of Europe, that
connected it with Brian Boru and the heroes of Clontarf, with the O'Neills
and O'Donnells, with Rory O'More, with the Wild Geese, and even to some
extent with the men of '98. It has lost all that they had--language,
traditions, music, genius, and ideas. Just when we should be starting to
build up anew the Irish race and the Gaelic nation--as within our own
recollection Greece has been built up anew--we find ourselves despoiled of
the bricks of nationality. The old bricks that lasted eighte