Page:The Gaelic State in the Past & Future.djvu/37

 IV.

never yet was a State, however perfectly devised, whose performance did not fall many leagues away from its intention. The dusty tomes on the top shelf only record the perfect, or imperfect, intention, for it is only by virtue of that intention that States exist at all. They do not record the follies and fatuities, the intrigues and trickeries, by which the best intentioned States are brought to grief. In all vocabularies the word Polity signifies something noble, and in all vocabularies the word Politics means something ignoble. It is perhaps necessary to remember this, for a certain type of historian (primed to depreciate everything Irish) has been very eager to discover the motes in the eye of the early Irish State while carefully neglecting the beams in the eye of its own modern wisdom.

Yet the intention of a State remains worthy for its own sake; and that the Irish performance during the first millenium did not fall very far away from the intention is clear, not only by what it achieved in Ireland, but also by what it achieved in Europe. As we have said, roses are not produced from waste heaps. The Irish State was actually in the process of solving its gravest fault when the invasion of a militarist system made that solution impossible. When Brian died in 1014 without establishing his