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cherished hereditary poets and historians; what with the purblind, cringing pedagogues of the present century, whose habit it was to beat and threaten their pupils for talking Irish; what with the high-handed action of the authorities, who, with cool contempt of existing circumstances, continued to appoint English-speaking magistrates, petty-sessions clerks, and local officials among a people to whom they could not make themselves intelligible; what with the hostility of the Board of Education, who do not recognise the language of those baronies where no English is spoken, even to the extent of publishing school-books in it; what with this, and our long slavery as a nation, we assert that the Irish land guage has had no chance of showing its capabilities, or those who speak it of taking their own part, and making their voice heard . . . .
"So strong is the feeling in America in favour of an attempt to preserve, what many people there feel to be the purest and most seductive thing that Irish nationality can present them with, that even the New York Herald, the leading newspaper in America, opened its columns the other day to a portion of a speech spoken in Irish by some prominent patriot in New York, which it not only printed in Irish as delivered, but also in the native type. Have we lived to see it? Are they less materialistic over there beyond the seas than we are at home? Does the New York Herald actually do for us what United Ireland obstinately refuses to do?
"There is just one other objection to be noticed; we are told that in learning English we are learning a superior language to that we are invited to leave off. It is so; but unless we learn it in a superior way, we get no good by the change. For all the ordinary purposes of everyday peasant life, I believe Irish to be enormously superior to English —certainly to the English that is spoken in Ireland. . . . .
