Page:The Gaelic State in the Past & Future.djvu/64

 liberty: its own. Were the enthusiasm of the Gaelic League that is to say, the national enthusiasm linked to the economic life of such communities, were Irish music, Irish dance, Irish history and Irish tale-telling provided in its halls, of a winter's evening, the flowing together of both streams would make these communities, not only stateships, but centres of national life as they were in the days of old. They would maintain their own musicians and their own historians and professors, would vie with one another in their excellence and exchange them with one another. They would maintain their own physicians as the older stateships did. They would elect their own administrative heads, and, under their presidency, would meet in their own assemblies to order and control, not only their business transactions, but all the life contained within them. In their own arbitration courts they could control all their internal litigation, and compel recognition of the findings of such courts by the force of the whole community as the old stateships did.

To such a point has the national resurrection come in the awakening of its distinctive State, that these things could be brought to pass by the smallest manipulation and arrangement. Yet in the early centuries their completion and organisation required the function of a State with its central authority. Not only did the parts make the State but the State also made the parts. Each acted together, and flowed together. So it will be again; and the Nation has come to a point when it only awaits its State.