The circumstance that in London on the Sunday nearest St. Patrick’s Day a service with Gaelic hymns and a Gaelic sermon is conducted every year, and has been conducted for the last three years, at the Cathedral at Westminster, and is attended by 6,000 or 7,000 Irish people, and that last year Dr. Alexander held a Gaelic service in a Protestant Cathedral in Dublin, should do much to show the manner in which the movement is spreading among all classes, and to indicate that it will in time demolish that false situation by which, for the greater part of the Continent, Ireland has been looked upon as merely an island on the other side of England to be seen through English glasses.

That strange recuperative power which the country has evinced at intervals in her history is, without a doubt, once again asserting itself, and a new spirit of restlessness and of effort, which in no sense can be supposed to supplant, or to do more than to supplement, political aspirations, is making itself felt.

It is doing so in a number of different directions, but the ultimate aim of all the forces which are at work may be said to be, in a cant phrase, to make it as much an object to desire to live in the country as hitherto it has been to die for it.

The inculcation of a spirit of self-reliance, the discouragement among the poorer classes of the notion that emigration is an object at which one should aim, the destruction among the richer of that spirit which is known at “West British,” and which implies an apologetic air on the part of its owner for being Irish at all, these are among the effects of the new movement.

The desire to see Ireland Irish, and not a burlesque of what is English, is its raison d’etre, and that it has made progress along the lines mapped out, the Gaelic League, from which it gains its driving force, the literary revival, and the movement for industrial development bear ample witness.

From the impression made by a few wits, English people have jumped to the conclusion that as a people we are specially blessed with a sense of humour, a curious non sequitur which the restraint, consciously or unconsciously inculcated by the Gaelic League, is likely to make more apparent, for it is killing that conception of the Irishman as typically a boisterous buffoon with intervals of maudlin sentimentality which the stage and the popular song have so long been content to depict without protest from us, and which left Englishmen with feelings not more exalted than those of their sixteenth and seventeenth century ancestors, to whom “mere Irish” was a term of opprobrium.