throughout all time, have been only against one enemy,
the invader, and, ending so often in material disaster, they have
conferred always a moral gain. Their memory uplifts the Irish heart;
for no nation, no people, can reproach Ireland with having wronged
them.

When, at the dawn of the Christian era, we first hear of Ireland from
external sources, we learn of it as an island harboring free men,
whose indomitable love of freedom was hateful to the spirit of
imperial exploitation.

Agricola's advice to the empire-builders of his day was that Rome
should "war down and take possession of Ireland, so that freedom
might be put out of sight."

It was to meet this challenge of despotism that the Scotic clans of
Alba turned to their motherland for help, and the sea was "white with
the hurrying oars" of the men of Erin speeding to the call of their
Highland kinsmen, threatened with imperial servitude.

The first external record we possess thus makes it clear that when
the early Irish went forth to carry war abroad, it was not to impose
their yoke on other peoples, or to found an empire, but to battle
against the Empire of the World in the threatened cause they held so
dear at home.

In this early Roman reference to Ireland we get the keynote to all
later Irish history--a warring down on the one hand, so that freedom
might be put out of sight; an eternal resistance, on the other, so
that it might be upheld.

It was this struggle that Ireland sought to maintain against every
form of attack, down through Danish, Norman, Tudor, Stuart, and
Cromwellian assault, to the larger imperialism of the nineteenth
century, when, as Thierry, the historian of the Norman Conquest,
tells us, it still remained the one "lost cause" of history that
refused to admit defeat. "This indomitable persistency, this faculty
of preserving through centuries of misery the remembrance of lost
liberty and of never despairing of a cause always defeated, always
fatal to those who dared to defend it, is perhaps the strangest and
noblest example ever given by any nation."

The resources Ireland opposed to her invaders have been unequal to
the founding of a great state, but have preserved a great tradition.
The weakness of Ireland lay in the absence of a central organization,
a state machine that could mobilize the national resources to defend
the national life. That life had to depend for its existence, under
the stress of prolonged invasion, on the sponta