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 _Gemütlichkeit_. 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