Lecture delivered to the Central Catholic Club, Belfast and published in four parts in An Claidheamh Soluis from February 3rd to April 21st, 1900.
Nations, like individuals, have their periods of youth, of manhood, and of decay. They have also their periods of illness and recuperation. The cold hand of time is, and has been from the beginning, sifting nations as well as individuals. Some perish in their youth, some before maturity, some in senility and decay. Individuals reckon their age by an astronomical division of time called years or part of years, but the age of nations is reckoned by centuries or parts of centuries. However, the whirring loom of time works steadily on, the sun shines in the heavens, the leaves clothe the trees in season, the grass sprouts on the hillside, the waters sing their way to the sea, quite unconnected with the fact of nations being born or effaced. The last year of a century is as the first, to-day is but as yesterday, why bother about epochs or births of nations, we are such stuff as dreams are made of, give me food, my stomach craves for it. That is the philosophy of the average human being, but his fellows cry out, ‘No! if you wish to eat and live you must work.’ A similar imperative order was given to primitive man when first he consorted with his fellows in a germ nation. The germ nation which was at first a conglomerate of individuals, thrown together by various causes, principally to huddle together for warmth, had little in common but human nature. Hunger impelled them to provide food. It was a common impulse. The drone they ordered away, they would have none of him; he got his marching orders, however, not by words but by blows, for I reckon that the human beings which I here picture had not at first a common speech, but made their wishes known to one another by a series of signs and grunts. Here, then, you have a small community of individuals, each with a soul, each with a teeming brain ready to think but not consecutively or steadily, each imitative, ready to copy the scream of a bird or the cry of an animal, the highest endowed of them surpassing the others in receptivity and becoming as it were a master. The sign-language disappears slowly, the grunts recur oftener; at length you have a speech after a fashion, brought out of chaos by suffering, by contortions of month and muscle, and lo! you have a language evolved, recreated. Let us call it Gaedhilg or Irish, the speech of the men of Erin. Dia do bheatha, a thousand times welcome out of primeval night. O noble Gaelic speech! thou hast done great things in this world, thy end is not yet. But what of the Gael? Is he too fated to renew his storied life and hear once again the cowed cléireach’s or priest’s ringing voice in sonorous Irish in the pulpit, and the whispering Irish prayer in his dying ear at the last dread hour? We can only hope and work, and hope too that in God’s good time the Gael shall be an honest master in his own land doing his appointed work in his own way, none daring to make him afraid.
Pessimism, taken in excess, like strong medicine, is injurious to the nervous system; a dose taken with circumspection is a preventive against many mental aberrations, notably that common disease called foolishness. ‘If we had but a Parliament in College-green,’ one will say, ‘Ireland would be a land flowing with milk and honey, our green, sunny Isle would be ‘first flower of the earth and first gem of the sea.’’ The pessimist on hearing this smiles grimly; he is usually a cynic with a good heart, and an eye to see realities. He glares at the interlocutor as though he could swallow him. ‘You are, indeed, a chattering jay,’ he says. ‘As to the milk, of course you would have it if you had the cows, and the honey provided you had the bees, but as to the Irish nation, that is dying—too many doctors have done for her. The Gael is a gone coon.’ Westminster is his pole-star; he exhibits his wounds and sores and tattered garments there to be made a mockery of; his spokesmen, whom he calls parliamentarians have become mountebanks, his physical-force patriots have become pot-house valiants, he has lost his golden Irish speech and moans and growls in a horrid jargon which he calls English. He lived and fought and sang through the long night of the Penal Laws. He had his own language and his own music then. He had thews and sinews, an eye like Mars and the heart of a lion. Do you think your house of cards at College-green will give him back-bone and a pulsating heart? You would have your Irish Black Rod there dressed up like a circus-man, your bewigged Mr. Speaker decked out like a sandwich-man, and all the other paraphernalia which they say add dignity to such mummeries. A nation is not made out of such stuff. Acts of Parliament do not make it, nay, rather, they unmake it. That hollow boom of cannon which ushered in foolish Grattan’s Parliament was the death-song of Ireland. The heroic old nation was tough. She is now in her death-throes. How shall we comment on this man’s words. Is he right? The every-day politician will answer, ‘He is a fomenter of dissension, away with him, strangle him.’ Since we cannot have light from that quarter let us examine the cynic ourselves.
Some writer—I forget whom or where—has observed that great nations before their final downfall have invariably produced a great soldier who reflects all the sterling qualities of the race. This it need be said is only a theory and not necessarily a fact. When Vercingetorix, or Fear-cinn-na-toire (the man at the head of the pursuit), as perhaps his own people would call him—when he, the renowned leader of the Gauls rode up to Caesar’s lines and urged his gallant charger to a wild gallop, making circuits round and round Caesar, each circuit becoming smaller and smaller till finally he dismounted with a bound and sat at the feet of the great Roman, Gaul and the fame of Gaul had gone for ever, her magnificent fighting men, large of limb and great of stature were all but exterminated, and her institutions, her knowledge, her language, are as though they had never been. So too of Rome’s great rival; the star of Carthage went down with Hannibal and Hasdrubal and the night-bird cries where her Senate sat. Can it be that our own Eire which nurtured Oscar and Cuculainn went down too at Clontarf when the victorious sword dropped from the dead hand of Brian? Ah no! Other conquerors illumined Irish history in the following centuries—Art MacMurrough, Shaun the Proud, Red Hugh, Tyrone, and O’Sullivan Beare, and another who was fit to stand near Caesar—the great Owen Rua, he for whom the spirit of the Gael cried out in expectancy. ‘Art thou he that is to come or do we look for another?’ I might say in passing that Hugh O’Neill failed only when his supplies gave out. During the Nine Years’ War he crushed each successive army sent against him, till at length Elizabeth’s Treasury was empty and she was obliged to issue false coin in Ireland to pay her men. Mountjoy in a letter to the Queen says, ‘These Irish cannot be conquered by the sword; famine alone will do it,’ and he proceeds to destroy crops and flocks and herds. ‘We have been harvesting in Ossory to-day,’ says one of his lieutenants facetiously, meaning that he was burning the standing corn. The enemy’s base of operations was in England and that could not be attacked. I marvel why physical-force patriots talk now-a-days about the sword. It is entirely out of the question in the making of Ireland of the future. Where the old Irish-speaking heroes failed the modern pike-man or blackthorn-man need not hope to succeed. The old sarcastic saw still holds good that ten men fully-armed and armoured by drill are at least a match for a man in his shirt. The sword, therefore, cannot be taken into consideration in the making of Ireland. Ireland’s own children, Irish soldiers and Irish police, are the bravest men in the English service, and would draw the sword to a man against their own countrymen. Such is discipline.
I am bound to make a passing reference to physical force, inasmuch as it has occupied the thoughts of Irishmen from time to time. Physical force would achieve something if John Bull would kindly say to Ireland, ‘You have often taunted me that I won you by poisoning, by treachery, by bribery and every other fiendish device than fair fighting. Now I have a plan. I have appointed of my own free will a Royal Commission, and its verdict is that I have robbed you by excessive taxation to the tune of one hundred million sterling since the Union. I shall therefore pay you this sum down. We have not on the whole got on well together, spend therefore this money on armaments and food-stuffs. Lay in a stock for ten years; I shall give you five years to do it in. Meantime commandeer all your able-bodied men in my service and throughout the Empire, as well as in America. Bring these home, drill and equip them. You will have the Wolseleys, the Robertses, the Beresfords of my forces to teach you, together with some fire-eating generals from America. You can thus provide an army of some two million stalwarts, as I understand your children number something like twenty-five million throughout the world. After five years then I shall blockade your ports and we shall fall to in earnest for real mastery.’ Given a free hand that way I think Ireland would come out of the struggle on top. Without some such mutual arrangement I see no good in talking of physical force.
When we come to politics we come down from the clouds to firm earth. Politics occupy a prominent place in Irish life, so prominent indeed that they have, like the lean kine, swallowed up all things which came in their way. From one point of view it was inevitable. Ireland being an agricultural country, the land question, through economic reasons, loomed large, and the social life of the country centred round it. Politics are a fight for land, a sordid fight if you will, but a very necessary one, for people must live. The theory of the greatest good for the greatest number was bound to prevail if resolutely pushed, though the forces arrayed against it were, and are still, formidable. The class of persons commonly called the aristocracy of Ireland, and their satellites, were vampires fastened on to the body of Ireland, and have inflicted wounds from which the country still bleeds. In politics they subscribed to the form of political belief called Unionism. Looked at from the Irish point of view the Irish Unionist is a political impostor. He has consistently thwarted every measure brought forward for the relief of his own country, though he is among the first to take advantage of any good that might accrue from it when it has become law. He has consistently sided with England, for which he probably cares little, against Ireland, for which he says he cares much. The Nationalists, on the other hand, are, I think, composed of two classes—the sincere men and the shams, the latter I hope not in the majority. The sincere class are Irish Radicals, who believe that politics alone will save a nation. The shams pretend to believe this too, till they prosper a little in the world, when their political creed becomes a pious opinion. Both classes say they love Ireland, and are ready to die for her as a matter of course. But Ireland does not call upon them to die for her. Their death would avail her little. She is herself going the road which leads to national extinction, and politics alone never shall and never could save her from shipwreck. Let us look a little into the genesis of politics. Towards the close of the 18th century—which, by the way, was not so destructive to Ireland as the 19th—a little girl was born to Henry Grattan, and she was straightway christened Grattan’s Parliament.
As to how she came forth in the midst of trumpetings and marchings of armed legions, history is voluble enough. The story has been retold and embellished time out of number in loud bursts of mud oratory. It were surely a subject to set pulses afire. At length the Protestant portion of Ireland, or a great part of it, after their record of plunders, had turned round and blossomed into Irish. The Gael in his wigwam heard the clamour. ‘They mean business,’ said he, ‘I shall be in at the death,’ and the commingling of the two streams—the union of Gael and Saxon after all their fierce and bloody contests—was about to produce a vivifying river of Irish life. The new birth was ushered in with salvos of artillery. Those salvos were in reality the death-song of the Gael and the joy-bells of Saxon ascendancy in Ireland. After some six hundred years of struggle the Saxon element, though the smaller, absorbed the larger, and spoke for the first time in the name of Ireland. Grattan welcomed the new era in sublime eloquence; he was gifted in that way beyond the sons of men. His little daughter waxed strong. The Gael did not quite know what to make of her. I am of opinion he suspected she was something of a fraud. I do not find him bursting into song in praise of her, though he was then specially gifted in that direction. Grattan’s eloquence dazzled him; he did not know what to make of that either, because he did not understand it; but men told him it was good, and he acquiesced, though he missed the lineaments of dark Rosaleen in the daughter. In his own way he was greater than Grattan, he was quite as eloquent in another and stronger tongue, he knew what suited him, he had courage, hope, tenacity, he was ready, despite penal laws and heart-rending disabilities, to back his opinions even with his skin, which Grattan was not. But he was disorganised, and he floundered on. Another and greater Irishman than Grattan saw deeper into things. That man was Henry Flood. If you wish to make your little daughter Irish, he would say in effect, you must teach her the language of this country; she cannot otherwise represent the body and soul of Eire; the historical continuity is broken. We are colonists stranded here. If we rule we must be Irishmen. He was a masterful mind even in its bigotry. He left a bequest for the furtherance of the Irish language, but a sleepy country let it slip through its fingers. As I live he would say, I can see woman-stealers prowling about; they will assuredly snatch away your daughter unless you keep a man with a battle-axe at her chamber door. ‘Be not afraid,’ simple Grattan would say, ‘I have perfect confidence in the Government; we must disband the Volunteers, they are a menace.’ But one day the woman-stealers came along, they fomented a campaign of murder which they called war in order to hide their diabolical designs, and then cajoled, threatened, and bribed the Protestants of Ireland till the dark tragedy was consummated in the murder of the young lady whose advent was hailed with the roar of cannon and the bellowings of men.
Grattan, whose hands were, however, clean, could only whimper about the frailties of human life. He left us a heritage of turmoil and a fine sentence embodying his own sorrows, how that he nursed at a certain cradle and followed a certain hearse. We have given this weak yet honest creature a niche in the Irish Pantheon, and our so-called national poet, Moore, has had his mewlings over the grave where the first, where the last, of our patriots lies. Our eloquent men since then have been modelled on Grattan. We have ‘followed the hearse’ ever since, and, with that tenacity which is a conspicuous quality in the Gael, though he is not credited with it, we have vowed from decade to decade that we shall bring back that dead daughter of Grattan and galvanise her into life, and fire salvos of tin cans—we have not the cannon—in the precincts of College-green.
During all this time Ireland has been sinking beneath our feet. We have faced St. Stephen’s from the rising of the sun till the going down thereof, as some worshippers face Mecca in an attitude of prayer. Our eloquent men have done it; why not we. It has now become fashionable. Daniel O’Connell, in some respects one of the most forceful characters of all time, followed in the wake of Grattan. He was masterful, resourceful, brainy. He found his co-religionists slaves for conscience-sake, and he brought them comparative freedom. He partially undid the foul treachery enacted at Limerick. It was not his fault that some of those he had liberated had followed the flesh-pots of Egypt and were ready to rend him. Parnell’s genius, helped by other prominent and able men of our time, bade fair to settle the vexed land question, and they carried Home Rule a little way forward on the broad and selfish back of this land question. Each and all, however, are culpable in that they have ignored the root from which a nation grows and blossoms—namely, its native tongue.
By slow, gradual, wise and persistent political efforts a country might acquire a certain share of material prosperity, but a nation as such has never yet in the history of the world been made by politics alone. Education native to the soil has been the great factor in the making of nations, and any nation which has neglected this is certain to be blotted eventually from the face of the earth. Some Irishmen will have it that an English-made system of education can be so framed as to suit our wants to a nicety, that is to say if we put a daub of green paint here and there on this English-made system it will become Irish forthwith. If I understand politicians aright they would ask us to preserve our souls in peace till in the dim future a benign Government would grant the Irish people a parish council or people’s Parliament at Dublin, and our legislators, in best House of Common’s manner, and with due observance of English accent, would, in their wisdom, put the nice veneer of green paint and other native tackling on our institutions, both legislative and educative, and, lo! the Irish Nation would spring from the ground in all the glory of a new and regenerated strength and proclaim aloud to her scattered children—‘Behold me, the mother of heroes! the dream which you dreamed on western prairies and beneath the Southern Cross is at length made a reality. Politics have brought me forth from the house of bondage. My chains are riven. I am a queen again!’ What mesmerism is this? People have eaten candles and thought they were sugar-sticks. A like mesmerism has been transforming our Irish people for many a long day. Their spokesmen have learnt repartee, and they are likely to comment on an obscure individual like myself with such words as ‘we have all been groping in darkness till this man spoke, and, behold now! all is light.’ A pointed shaft of that kind, however, does not frighten me. Moreover, I am but enunciating an old truth often repeated—namely, that a country which gives up its native speech, had better strike tents and give in once and for all, because it will as certainly die as a fire when its oxygen is consumed. The Irish language is the oxygen of Irish nationhood. Kill the language and Irish nationhood is but a molten mass, which is day by day simmering down, with a splutter here and there, till its latent heat be gone, and nothing remains but cold carbon and ashes. The testimony of foreign scholars and thinkers has often been quoted during the past few years to bring home to us Irish people the truth of that conclusion, but many of our own people have seen as clearly as any foreigner that a nation which breaks with its past is fast going to shipwreck. MacCurtin, in the last century, made a spirited appeal to the aristocracy of Ireland to save the tongue. He spoke to deaf ears. Those men were nurtured on an uncongenial soil—that of Trinity College, an institution founded on theft, and true to its mission it has always stood forth as the unbending enemy of all things Irish. It is to-day a toothless and discredited old harridan. It, however, gives tongue whenever and wherever it sees a sign of coming life in the country on whose plunder it has fattened. A Rev. Mr. Mahaffy, who, I believe, teaches ancient languages in that exclusive institution, has on recent occasions put on his best Sunday-school expression, and has warned all and sundry that the Gaelic League is a kernel of mischief, equally dangerous to the Irish and English peoples. That meddlesome gentleman has no knowledge of the Irish language, and little if any of the Gaelic League. It is said he has some knowledge of Greek and presumably of English, though one has doubts on the latter point when reading a wordy, newspapery production by him, called ‘Alexander’s Empire,’ and another little book called ‘Rambles and Studies in Greece,’ which in spite of its title is only a second-rate guide-book. Shall we pay heed to the warning voice of the friend or to the seductive cries of the wheedler?
I do not appeal to the testimony of living men, rather do I recall the utterance of a still voice from its early grave. ‘A nation should guard its language more than its territories, ‘tis a surer barrier and a more important frontier than any fortress or river,’ said Thomas Davis more than fifty years ago, and his words of wisdom are bearing fruit to-day. Language to the minds of some persons is like an outer garment which can be dispensed with at pleasure if we have but sufficient money to buy another and more fashionable one; and passing strange it is that we are the only people in Europe whose actions justify the apparent truth of that doctrine. Spenser said long ago that if the speech be Irish the heart must needs be Irish, and hence Spenser would infer that if the speech be English the heart must needs be English. That is not the case, however. We Irish people are a study in the human family. With English speech on our lips as the everyday tongue we cannot be Irish, with English speech on our lips we are not English. What are we?
It is now generally acknowledged, I believe, that English speech was introduced amongst us for political and religious reasons, or, as Dr. Whately, the champion of the National School system, would say, ‘To make the Irish youth a happy English child.’ So far the experiment has been an egregious failure from the English standpoint. We must be candid. Let people take what comfort or discomfort they can out of the admission, that we have nothing in Irish literature bearing on our relations with England as virulent as some of the diatribes hurled at that country by Irishmen whose speech was English. One would expect to find it the other way in a language which far surpasses the comparatively tame English speech in glow, in splendour, in finely-tuned idioms, whose sarcasm cuts like a rapier. I think, however, it is not necessary for one to hate one’s neighbour in order to love one’s own country. One is at liberty to hate one’s neighbour if so minded whether his speech be English or any other tongue. We wish, however, to put the study of our native language on a higher plane. Hatred is not the natural sustenance of patriotism and a patriotism which thrives solely on hatred is of a mean order. Take away the causes for hatred and what has patriotism of that nature to feed upon? The average Englishman is a self-satisfied, self-righteous patriot. He loves his England, provided he is pretty comfortable there. He has no particular love for Ireland, Scotland, or Wales—nay, more, I think, though he does not hate them as such, he has a hazy contempt for all three, and looks in bovine wonder if told that the natives of these places are enjoined by the law of nature to love and revere their own natal spots more than his. His tenets of patriotism are too exclusive, too bigoted. They put upon human nature a tax which it was never destined to bear. Precisely the same rule holds good with regard to language.
There is a native language, or there is not. Language is either an accident or a design. Language cannot be scientifically traced back to the confusion of tongues at the tower of Babel. It is known that a primitive tongue called Aryan existed at a remote time, and that Gaelic, Greek, Latin, German, and other tongues branched off from it. These tongues had become the vehicle of thought of diverse nationalities, and each nation claimed its own branch as the particular form of speech or native tongue of that particular people. That native language then is the mirror in which the life of that particular people is reflected. It is the expression of its growing thought. It is the reflex of its soul. As a nation is, however, made up of individuals, let us see how a certain form of speech affects an individual. An English baby boy is taken to France, and there nursed by a Frenchwoman. The song which lulls him to sleep is in French, the encouraging words which greets him as he awakes is in French, his playmates are French, his speech is French, he grows into manhood a Frenchman. Still he is English, the native language of his former country is English, but to him it would be a strange tongue and probably a harsh one, because the sounds of a foreign tongue do not at first strike the ear pleasantly. He has heard that English literature is rich and varied, and embodies the thoughts of his forefathers. Out of respect for his old country he has even looked through a French translation of Shakespeare, but it does not please him half so well as Moliere. He is no longer an Englishman, such is the extraordinary influence exercised on mind by language. It is said too that it alters the features by giving play to speech organs, and that through heredity these facial characteristics do not vanish for many generations after acquiring a new speech. Some will be inclined to minimise the transformation produced by language, but I would invite them to think it out and take as an illustration, not the lost tribes of Israel but the descendants of the Irish Brigades in the service of France, Spain, Italy, Austria and Russia. Where are those descendants? They have all been absorbed. Even their very surnames have vanished except in a few isolated cases where the owners thought it polite to retain them.
It is a common fallacy to suppose that language enters into the mind of the child. The contrary is the fact. The child’s mind enters into the language. He does not at first associate a certain word with a certain object, but rather associates the object—say a lump of sugar—with the words. Hence the child learns a language not by words but by a series of mind-pictures reflected on the brain by a process similar to that of throwing photographs on a screen. Bilingual people will bear me out in this. They will tell us that any Irish word—say, ‘cnoc’ and its English equivalent ‘hill,’ or such colour-names as black, red, green, and their Irish equivalents dubh, dearg, glas—do not convey the same impressions to their minds. We can readily believe it, because speech and thought have a closer affinity to each other, and have a more potent influence upon each other, than one is conscious of at first sight. This, in the eyes of Irishmen, is a very small matter, so insignificant, indeed, that it is not worth consideration. The consequences, however, of this lack of vision have done incalculable harm to us as a race. We are well-nigh transformed into a feeble imitation of Englishmen, solely by the influence of the English tongue. Our individuality is being changed for the worse, our power of initiative is gone, we are fast becoming assimilated both in Ireland and abroad, and if we pursue the same path which we have trodden during this waning century, the name of Irishman in a few generations hence will become a misnomer. The process is going on before our eyes. We have made but a feeble effort to stem it. We will take three prominent Irishmen as an illustration. I am not conscious of an impropriety in naming them: they are Lord Killowen, Lord Wolseley and Mr. Justin McCarthy. They live in England, their speech is English, their children if they have any live in England; in the second or at most the third generation, their children’s children will have lost all traces of their Irish ancestry. Sometimes, perhaps, during family gossip their Irish descent might be casually referred to. That is all. The Irish people one and all in England, Wales, and Scotland, are becoming absorbed in like manner. I met a Welshman whose tongue was Welsh and he rejoiced in the name of Casey. The influx of immigrants from Ireland has little or no influence on this disintegrating process, as their children’s children are absorbed in the same way. In America, Australia, and wherever the Gael is settled he is being absorbed into other nationalities. The Irish people are going with a vengeance. It is a thought that vexes one’s very soul. The political turmoils in the old land have given the exiles a semblance of cohesion. They have nobly come to the rescue time and again, such is the tenacity of the Irish character. The ties, however, are being gradually loosened by time. The golden link of Irish speech has been severed, and the race is drifting surely, steadily, year by year, away from Irish ideals and Irish thought. The race at home is being transformed in like manner.
Almost nine or ten years ago, when politics were great in the land and being a follower of Parnell was a synonym for perfervid patriotism, I crossed the channel from Cork to Milford, and amongst the passengers were three children from Cork county. They were communicative. I could gather that they were Catholics, and their parents Nationalists of the well-to-do class. The children were going to school to the good nuns at Swansea, and when I ventured to say that they could be educated at home, they said that was so, that ‘a superior English education’ was obtainable at home, but that their parents wished them to learn the English accent as well. Let us hope the children learnt it in Swansea. Their father would probably subscribe handsomely to the patriotic funds, would utter Grattanesque platitudes on platforms about Ireland a nation and be applauded accordingly. He would furthermore invite the county Member of Parliament to his table, and the good ladies of the company would sigh for the fashions of Mayfair and the joys of a drive in that unsavoury-named place Rotten-row. What a hollow mockery it is all. I have a suspicion that such people are types, and the thought makes one almost despair of the race, and wring one’s hands and say, alas! the descendants of the noble Gaels whose slogan peal of victory was heard at Moy Rath, Clontarf, and Benburb, became extinct through their own folly in the dismal nineteenth century.
Are latter-day politics strong enough and comprehensive enough to stem the tide of snobbishness which is eating at the vitals of a nation? No. Politicians have been in too much of a hurry. They do not appear to have known the wisdom of building deep. Ireland is as a strong building vexed with shot and shell for centuries. When the storm has at length somewhat abated the politicians have busied themselves with the necessary work of repairing the roof. This is what they call ‘practical work,’ and they pride themselves, like all men, in being ‘practical.’ Hence they hammer away at the roof and make an awful din. They forget to examine the foundations, which are all but shivered. Look to the foundations, then, or building, roof, and politicians will eventually come down with a rush. Continental scholars and thinkers have raised their voices to warn the Irish people that if their native speech is allowed to die the brave old race will cease to be. A famous Danish professor and Irish scholar, Dr. Holger Pedersen, writes to the Commissioners of National Education in Ireland—‘If you blot the Irish Language out of the educational programme you are committing not only an injustice but an act of barbarity, of cruelty, of murder. You are, in short, murdering a nation;’ and he proceeds to prove that he knows what he is talking about. Grattan himself, who could have done so much had he had more backbone, said, in writing to the Secretary of the Education Board in 1811, ‘I think the diversity of language and not the diversity of religion constitutes a diversity of people. I should be very sorry that the Irish language should be forgotten, but glad that the English language should be generally understood.’ The English is generally understood now, but what of the Irish language? A small society, the Gaelic League, without wealth, without influence, without any special talents, has stepped into the breach, and has called to the sleeping, drifting nation to save itself. The nation yawns a bit and wonders what all the bother is about. The Member of Parliament, who should be the natural guardian of the nation which selects him to do its work, yawns too. He sometimes wakes up, makes an unmeaning speech about the star of freedom rising in the east and bids the nation look and hope. The poor nation looks and hopes. It has looked thitherward many a time. It does not see the star nor its reflection, but fancies it is there nevertheless, because Mr. So-and-So said so.
I do not decry politics. They have their uses. I do not sneer at my countrymen who happen to be Members of Parliament. Some of them, all of them, are excellent men, but it is a cause of surprise to me that they do not take an object-lesson from Bohemia, Finland, Hungary, and, nearer home, Wales. It is not a coincidence but a consequence that each of these countries increased in wealth and worldly comforts, as well as in mental quickening and moral fibre, with the rise of its native language. Bohemia had all but lost her tongue, and was a stupid province of the Austrian empire a hundred years ago. The great German tongue was the cause of her stupefaction. I would ask sceptics read her history. She is to-day a nation within a nation. Her own tongue has saved her and made her the most learned and prosperous partner in the Austrian realm. Prussia, herself the backbone of the German Empire, was well-nigh strangled out of existence by the dead weight of the French tongue, even in her military days under Frederick the Great, but her thinkers and statesmen saw the yawning gulf in time and recoiled in terror. Though the fashion of the Court was contagious, a good number even of the higher classes let the Great Frederick make French verses with Voltaire, but they themselves encouraged the study of their national German tongue, and thus preserved their continuity with the past. Had they done otherwise Prussia would have been to-day in mental thrall to Paris dragging at the heels of France with France laughing at her Prussian brogue. In all human probability the United Germany of to-day would not be in existence. Have we Irish people the will and the grit to make our native language the speech of the hearth in every Irish home? My answer is—yes.
The Irish language most be the language of this country. No man or men dare say no, if we will it, and until that is done we had better cease prating about Ireland a Nation. English has come to stay. It can look after itself. The English system of education in Ireland has been severely handled lately by a very able man, Dr. Hickey, and his condemnation is none too severe, because the system is both anti-Irish and un-English. I think this can be proved, but it does not come within my province to-night. My aim is to show that Ireland cannot be preserved as a nation unless her native speech is saved. An illustration is, however, better than words. Wales has preserved her speech, her music, her customs, and hence her individuality and nationhood. Cornwall, inhabited by a sister people, has lost her speech and her customs, and Cornwall was and is not. I have heard it urged by some of my schoolmaster friends as a plea against the introduction of Irish into the day-schools that their programme is already full. Doubtless these gentlemen think that objection is insurmountable. Wales and Belgium have solved that problem. It is solved in the Jewish national school in Belfast, and I trust the combined strength of Ireland will mend or end the Board of Education unless the question is solved in the national schools throughout this land. We seek not compulsion, but we shall demand permission to have the language taught where there is a demand for this right. The teaching of Welsh was made compulsory in the schools of the Principality by Act of Parliament in 1893. Still, though the teaching of the Welsh language is compulsory, the wishes of the pupils’ parents are respected, as I read of a case in a Board School at Cardiff, where but two per cent of the pupils were Welsh, and yet on a plebiscite of the pupils’ parents throughout the district eighty-eight per cent, showed in favour of the bilingual teaching.
These practical people were swayed by the expressed opinions of the best educationists, native and foreign. Lord Wolseley, who does not lay claim to be an educationist, but is a man of the world as well as a soldier, has a favourite theory that if before a child is twelve it is taught to talk and think in two languages it can afterwards learn as many languages as it pleases, almost without an effort, whereas if it has never been taught to think in two languages, it will always be a matter of difficulty to speak in any language but its own. Kuno Meyer, who is an educationist and one of the foremost scholars in Europe, has characterised our present system of teaching as a ‘gross educational blunder.’ We have about a million Irish speakers in Ireland to-day; we had about five times that number when the so-called national system was introduced, and this unnatural system was worked in a manner as to how not to teach the people. The chosen leaders of the people—O’Connell and the rest—looked on and said not a word. Assuredly O’Connell was not a nation-builder. One great prelate out of all the shepherds, John of Tuam, would have none of it. ‘The national school,’ said he, ‘is the grave of the national tongue,’ and he might add of the nation itself, a thought, doubtless, he had in his mind. ‘I spent six months on the western seaboard improving my knowledge of Irish,’ said the well-known Danish linguist and philologist, Dr. Pedersen. ‘I found the Irish-speaking peasant possessed of many ideas and a most copious vocabulary; I met others who boasted of their knowledge of English, but they were the most stupid people I ever met.’ That is the testimony of an unprejudiced foreigner. These people bartered their heritage, and did not get even the mess of potage in return. We have sown the wind and now we are reaping the whirlwind.
The Irish as a distinct race are disappearing as surely as the Shannon is lost in the sea, though they are still physically the finest specimens of manhood in the world. The Times newspaper, which is hardly ever complimentary to Irishmen, made the remark about a year ago that in heavy athletics Munster is an easy first. It was right. I can name about twelve athletes from that single province alone who might safely be pitted against any dozen men in any other country. The men of the other provinces are of course equally good. They are all British the English newspapers will say. Gather them in the English language will say, they are all English like our Anglo-Saxon cousins in America. We march under one king—Shakespeare. The Irishman protests, but he marches nevertheless.
The Irishman, however, consoles himself for the loss of his own tongue, if he should ever think about it at all, by the reflection that the English language is useful to him, that, in fact, he could not get on without it. I have grave doubts as to the utility of English to the Irish emigrant. Had he had a sound literary knowledge of the Irish tongue he could quite easily pick up a working knowledge of English in America or elsewhere. Let us test it. I think I am rather over than under the mark when I say that not more than ten per cent of the Germans who land in America have a knowledge of English. You might travel for days in Germany outside the shipping centres and the hotels without meeting a man among the peasantry who knows English. This class of people emigrate largely. Should they require it they acquire a knowledge of English in America very easily; probably, on the whole, they acquire a better knowledge of it than our people. They do not enter politics with the zest of our people, but they preserve their individuality better; they are sober, industrious, and well-to-do. I was unable to provide statistics of the wealth per capita of the Irish and Germans in America, but it is the general opinion that as a community they are far more prosperous than our people. Whilst they are good American citizens they adhere firmly to the tradition of the Fatherland, the speech of their homes is German, their reading is principally in German, they have six hundred newspapers in German published in America, and they are a compact solid body who can act in unison if need be. There were some strictures passed on their old land by newspapers during the Spanish-American war. They protested, they organised a public meeting of delegates from several German societies in America. Some seven thousand Germans assembled, stolid, self-contained men; the business of the meeting and all the speeches were in German; no, not all, there were two English speeches, and these were delivered by two prominent Irish-Americans of advanced views.
The German Michael will not be absorbed by Anglo-Saxondom; the Irish Pat will be. It was not thus when the Irishman had his own tongue. Ireland absorbed the Dane and the Norman, she absorbed the Cromwellian and the Williamite in their third generation, and she would have long since absorbed the Scotch and English element in the north of Ireland had not her power of assimilation ceased with the decay of her tongue. She was then the absorber, now she is the absorbed. Who shall deny it? Should the son of a London candlemaker prolong his stay amongst us for hunting or fishing and make himself agreeable, half the countryside will make an effort to speak as he speaks, to do as he does. It was not ever thus. Tenacious old Ireland cast the maze of her noble and wondrous speech around the newcomer’s children. Though her sons and his people waded in each other’s blood, their offspring in the second generation were alike Irishmen. Acts of Parliament were passed and put in force to prohibit such a change. The Irish people smiled at them. The children of those who passed them scoffed at the Acts of Parliament and drank in the Irish speech. No other influence can perform such a human miracle but language. The country was then a nation even without Members of Parliament. She had her native speech, and a country without a native speech ceases to be. She becomes the imitator. She loses the power of initiative. She stumbles forward or backward whithersoever she is led. Gaelic-speaking Ireland stumbled too. Our fathers had their faults, but they had likewise great qualities. If we understand not their speech we cannot judge them rightly. They are but shadows lost to us in the mist of a foreign atmosphere. We read of them as we read of Marshal Ney or Marlborough. Many of our forefathers were men of whom any nation might be proud. Mr. Laurence Ginnell in his admirable book on the Brehon Laws states that Gaelic Ireland produced more first-class men in every walk of life than we can ever hope to produce again.
The nation, however, is not yet gone. Its language still lives, and must be made the foundation-stone for the future building up. Politics will have their due place and their due recognition, as in all well-regulated countries. Temperance in drink is a greater factor in the making of nations than politics. An earnest nation of water drinkers would achieve everything but the impossible. An angel of light in the early part of this waning century brought grace to many a home and was a nation-builder in his own sphere. That man was Father Matthew. The work of that great reformer, however, was blasted by an angel of death who rose from the deep and fluttered his blighting wings over the devoted land. Hunger and pestilence came in his wake, and Ireland lost more men in the famine [ than in the] wars of the seventeenth century. An ounce of commonsense, together with a knowledge of the most elementary principles of agriculture, would have averted the famine. The tillage gave warning in one year that it was exhausted and would not grow the potato. Had someone said ‘sow oats as your ancestors did and you will have oatmeal,’ four millions of human beings would have been saved from death or dispersion. But the man was not at hand. Davis, the one thinker and practical man of that age, was dead.
There were politicians in those days in abundance, but they were too busy making long-winded speeches in English and pursuing the butterfly called ‘Repeal.’ The bró or quern for grinding the corn and the criahar or sieve were in every household in old Ireland. I know a glen where these were in use till twenty years ago. Oats for food as well as potatoes were sown there; the potatoes failed but the oats did not, and the people passed unscathed through the dire visitation of forty-seven. They adhered to their ancestral custom. Woe be to the people who remove the landmarks of their fathers. The famines in old Ireland were partial and local, and were occasioned by the wanton destruction of crops and herds in the time of war. The people were then self-contained. The men sheared the sheep, the housewife carded the wool and spun the thread which the local weaver weaved into cloth. The linen for shirting was produced at home, the foodstuffs were grown on the farm and only luxuries were bought. Men danced and sang and lived happy in spite of the penal laws. They had the fireside stories, the songs, the music, they had the inspiration and the ideas which the richest tongue in the world brought down to them from the far-off time when Tara was young.
Modern Ireland could not withstand twenty years of the penal laws. She has not the mental equipment. The peasant of to-day has no language, he has no songs but abominations, he has no memories but of yesterday, he gets his shoddy clothing from Manchester and his food from New York. His mind is spoonfed by England, his stomach is filled from the same quarter if he has the money to pay for it. His home is not self-contained nor independent. If by a chance of war the British ports should be blockaded he would starve on his island like a prisoner in a besieged town. We are on the last rung of the nineteenth century. We can almost look into the new. What will Ireland do? We have endeavoured to show her the road which leads to intellectual supremacy and to prosperity on the old and national lines. She had trodden it from of old and achieved great things. She has been blindfolded in the present century and led into bogs and morasses. A number of her children are trying hard to extricate her. They have all but succeeded. They have hewn the fallen trees which have barred her progress on the old and firm road, they are shovelling away the mud from beneath her feet, they are washing her noble face, which had been soiled by the lying of enemies and maligners. The work has been heavy. She still needs the help of all her children, both priests and people. Let them come on and we shall take our beloved Eire through the twentieth century with her flag flying.