Page:The Gaelic State in the Past & Future.djvu/66

 one without removing the other. The modern state of Ireland is not, in that sense, an organisation at all; it is simply a configuration imposed upon its life, not fitting that life at all, neither expressing, containing nor conveying that life, and therefore used or abused by it according as occasion offers.

Even the very counties, those -results of the breaking up of the stateships and the making of English shire-lands, are unreal things that express little of the life of the people. Their long continuance has made them familiar, and so has given them a fictitious reality; but they again are a configuration and not an organisation. They may persist for awhile with that fictitious life, chiefly because they have become themes of local partisanship; but in the degree in which the Nation sets about to displace its configuration by a real organisation, they must inevitably pass into a historical memory,;and not a very pleasing historical memory at that.

Everything that has been introduced by England into Ireland is destined to rejection, and not as a matter of prejudice, but as an inevitable fact in statesmanship. Suits cut for other people, or demanded by other people's necessities, are the proper wear for clowns. At best these things were wrung as concessions given with poor grace after long and bitter war; at worst they were anticipations of further war and the spontaneous creation of an alien thought. The first was better than the second because it did spring from the initiative of the people, and partially and ineffectually answered that