poets.  But for a detailed exposition of the contrast I must send the reader to Mrs Green’s “Irish Nationality.”  In a world in which right is little more than a secretion of might, in which, unless a strong man armed keeps house, his enemies enter in, the weakness of the Gaelic idea is obvious.  But the Roman pattern too had a characteristic vice which has led logically in our own time to a monstrous and sinister growth of armaments.

To those who recognise in this deification of war the blackest menace of our day the vision of a culture State is not without charm.  The shattering possibilities enfolded in it would have fevered Nietzsche and fascinated Renan.  But, be that as it may, Ireland played Cleopatra to the Antony of the invaders.  Some of them, indeed, the “garrison” pure and simple, had all their interests centred not only in resisting but in calumniating her.  But the majority yielded gaily to her music, her poetry, her sociability, that magical quality of hers which the Germans call Gemuetlichkeit.  In a few centuries a new and enduring phrase had designated them as more Irish than the Irish themselves.  So far as any superiority of civilisation manifests itself in this first period it is altogether on the side of Ireland.  This power of assimilation has never decayed.  There never was a nation, not even the United States, that so subdued and re-fashioned those who came to her shores, that so wrought them into her own blood and tissue.  The Norman baron is transformed in a few generations into an Irish chieftain, and as often as not into an Irish “rebel.”  The Jacobite planter of the first decade of the seventeenth century is in the fifth decade found in arms against Cromwell; the Cromwellian settler is destined in turn to shed his blood for James II. and Catholicity.  Protestant colonists who, in the early eighteenth century, enforce and defend the abominable Penal Laws, will in 1782 demand, with drawn swords, that henceforth there shall be no longer a Protestant colony but in its place an Irish nation.  The personal history of the captains of the Irish cause in modern times is no less remarkable.  O’Connell begins his public career in the Yeomanry called out to put down the insurrectionary movement of Emmet.  Isaac Butt comes first into note as the orator of the Orange Party in Dublin.  Parnell himself steps out of a Tory milieu and tradition into the central tumult of agitation.  Wave after incoming wave of them, her conquerors were conquered.  “Once again,” cried Parnell in the last public utterance of his life, “I am come to cast myself into the deep sea of the love of my people.”  In that deep sea a hundred diverse currents of blood have met and mingled; they have lost their individual drift to become part of the strong tide of national consciousness and national unity.  If Irish history is to be regarded as a test of racial superiority then Ireland emerges with the crown and garlands of victory.  We came, we the invaders, to dominate, and we remained to serve.  For Ireland has signed us with the oil and chrism of her human sacrament, and even though we should deny the faith with our lips she would hold our hearts to the end.