Page:The Irish Constitution Explained.djvu/10

 accorded international rank long after England had risen to nationhood, and when invasion had brought her national polity to ruin and silenced the voice of poet and scholar.

These are not matters merely of the past. If they were, they could be dismissed to the antiquity in which they would lie. But they live in the consciousness of a nation to-day; and therefore to-day they are a factor, to neglect which would be to neglect a prime element without which neither the present nor the future may be understood. Only the sentimentalist waves out of sight considerations that are unpleasant to him. The realist faces every element of being, conscious or unconscious; for he knows that only out of the sum of all those elements can life proceed, or creation begin.

For these ancient dignities have passed into the consciousness of every sort of Irishmen. It was, for example, Molyneux who, in his Case of Ireland Stated at the end of the 17th century, first among modern Irish writers based an argument upon them. Molyneux was an English colonist. In the wars of Tirconnell and Patrick Sarsfield he had fled to England, returning only when Ginkel the Dutchman had won the field for his master, now monarch of England. He regarded the ancient nation with aversion. Yet when the English Parliament harassed what he proudly conceived to be the ancient liberty of Ireland, he stated the case of that nation, stated it as his case, in a public document of historic moment; and the English Parliament caused his book to be burned by the public hangman.

The sorest part of his book was his reference to the Council of Constance of 1416. This Council may rightly claim to be the first of modern international congresses. At it a certain question of precedence had arisen between France and England, which was referred to the Court of Heralds. In the judgment which was given it was stated as an international ruling that Europe was first constituted from four nations. These nations, in the order of their precedence, were Rome, Byzantium, Ireland and Spain. And