Page:The Gaelic State in the Past & Future.djvu/67

 demand, while the second sprang from the same alien intention that has created three centuries of almost unremitting warfare. And whether that intention stalk as an undisguised foe, or prank about with the antics of a philanthropist, the result in statesmanship is the same. Instead of effecting an organisation it creates a configuration; instead of producing human contentment, comfort and ease it produces irritation, exasperation and enmity; instead of being as flexible as the life it contains it is as rigid as the thought that made it; instead of being capable of development it is only capable of being broken or abused; instead of being a National State it is a national despair and futility. Therefore statesmanship must neglect its achievements (though continuity of government may compel their continuance for awhile) and must make a direct approach to the national life, and its needs and necessities, human and economic, in order to build again, however slowly to build, from the foundations the structure that those foundations decree and suggest.

It is in the discovery of those foundations that history becomes a matter of first importance. Not a portion of that history; not the history of the eighteenth century, which did not express the life of the people but the life of a small colony the proportion of which to the whole is even smaller now than it was then, besides being under the influence of the awakening of the nineteenth century; but the whole of that history, from the beginnings to the present, for in Irish history probably more than in