Page:The Gaelic State in the Past & Future.djvu/15

 (generally as the result of menace) by Englishmen who went abroad as colonists, singing sweet hymns about the White Man's Burden and the Lord's Anointed. Earlier colonists in those lands, however, such as the French in Canada and the Dutch in South Africa, give these constitutions no fealty because they do not answer their instincts. For the same reason Irishmen in these places, though less solid and unified from the nature of their case, generally become subversive and revolutionary units, introducing and desiring changes such as the constitutions never contemplated. When these changes are examined they are generally found to hark back to the laws and meanings of the old State of Ireland. But in Ireland itself the Nation, reduced though it be in population, and by oppression made unsure of itself, is entire and compact; racially more compact than any nation in Europe, with little of the colonial element remaining in it; and it draws almost wholly on its historic past. And from that past the answer must be found for its future, for the past has stored up instincts and intuitions, old memories of the blood and desires of the national mind, that are waging to burst into the future. The answer therefore is not to be found in a study of the constitutions of other peoples, but in a wise study of Irish history.

There is, outside of books, no such thing as Utopia. There is no such thing as a State abstractly good or bad in itself. A State is only good or bad in the degree in which it answers, or fails to answer, the needs of the Nation for which it