Page:The Gaelic State in the Past & Future.djvu/12

 the wearing of the crown compels a new comportment. But if a crown wrought in some other workshop and made according to some other nation's desires be pressed upon its brow the whole result must necessarily be ungainly and disfiguring. If there is no responsibility in the making there can be no responsibility in the wearing, and there, is no morality at the beginning or in the end. Yet if a Nation can clothe itself in its own responsibility, and wear a crown of its own devising, that Nation is no more only a Nation; it is a Sovereign State.

Ireland is not a Sovereign State, but only a nation. Once she was a Sovereign State, and the result was so comely and so full of responsibility that when her sister states were ravaged by barbarian inroads from the north and east she went out among them and rebuilt their faith and culture. Nearly all modern European culture and learning rest on what Ireland wrought during the sixth seventh and eighth centuries, not on the earlier Roman and Greek cultures, for the link with these things was only maintained through Ireland. It was so maintained because Ireland was a Sovereign State, secure in its sovereignty. That sovereignty was suppressed, that statehood was broken, because of the lust of imperial conquest fashioned out of military strength and resting always on that strength. Piece by piece that state was taken and hammered into dust, with a malignancy and hatred very hard to understand, until the people, driven forth into the mountains and waste places of their own land, had no longer any part of their own