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xliv stranger who tries to speak Irish in Ireland runs the serious risk of being looked upon as a proselytizing Englishman. As matters are still progressing gaily in this direction, let nobody be surprised if a pure Aryan language which, at the time of the famine, in '47, was spoken by at least four million souls (more than the whole population of Switzerland), becomes in a few years as extinct as Cornish. Of course, there is not a shadow of necessity, either social or economical, for this. All the world knows that bi-linguists are superior to men who know only one language, yet in Ireland everyone pretends to believe the contrary. A few words from the influential leaders of the race when next they visit Achill, for instance, would help to keep Irish alive there in sæcula sæculorum, and with the Irish language, the old Aryan folk-lore, the Ossianic poems, numberless ballads, folk-songs, and proverbs, and a thousand and one other interesting things that survive when Irish is spoken, and die when it dies. But, from a complexity of causes which I am afraid to explain, the men who for the last sixty years have had the ear of the Irish race have persistently shown the cold shoulder to everything that was Irish and racial, and while protesting, or pretending to protest, against West Britonism, have helped, more than anyone else, by their example, to assimilate us to England and the English, thus running counter to the entire voice of modern Europe, which is in favour of extracting the best