Page:The Gaelic State in the Past & Future.djvu/13

 State in which to house themselves, had to rely on a continuing national sense, fed partly by faith, enriched by old memories, burnt by a suffering hardly to be paralleled in history, but in itself something quite peculiar and indefinable.

The result was inevitable. Housed, on their own historic land, in a State which was no State at all because it was not of their own devising, the Irish people have repudiated all responsibility for it, have misused and abused it, and have arisen in a, continual series of revolts against it. They were morally bound to do so, or become no more a nation but a slave race. Continuing a Nation they were bound to assert their protest; and they have habitually done so very remarkably by the assertion of the laws, meanings and implications of their old State, destroyed centuries ago, as against the forms, meanings and implications of a system of government utterly alien to them. There are few things in history more remarkable or arresting than this challenge of an alien government with the laws and procedures of a State that centuries before had been hewn asunder, had been trampled under foot, but had continued in the instincts and intuitions of the Nation—the instincts and intuitions that in the first instance, at the dawn of history, had built that State.

Such a state of affairs, continued long enough, was bound to claim the attention of the world. It has succeeded in doing so; and the immediate result has been that all has become bustle and hurry to mend the calamitous condition of Ireland. Men