Page:The Gaelic State in the Past & Future.djvu/59

 (able to take its course again. The liberty that Grattan had won had been the liberty of the English State in Ireland; the liberty, that is to say, of the State-idea of the uppermost layer. The overwhelming mass of the population was comprised of the old Nation with its own and separate State-idea. It had no part in, and no interest in, the liberty their jailers had won for themselves; and the State in which that liberty had been held (if State it may be called that represented nothing of the population) voiced none of its instincts or desires. But when the watcher at the gate had been struck down the Nation arose, feebly at first, and marched into the nineteenth century to claim satisfaction for those desires and instincts.

The course of the nineteenth century in Ireland is like a resurrection from the dead. It is full of memories—memories prior to 1603 and the destruction of the Irish State. The very order is significant. The Nation had lost certain things in a certain order; in its resurrection it set about to regain them in the inverse order. It had lost, first, its State; then its language and culture, the flowers of that State, had been penalised; then its land, on which the State had been based, was taken; and finally its liberty of faith. It won back, first, its liberty to faith; then its land; then its separate culture; and now it seeks its State.

Literally and precisely the nineteenth century in Ireland is one of the most remarkable movements in history. It is like a great hall full of ghostly memories, but ghosts that bewilderingly become