The Gaelic State in the Past Future, or the Crown of a Nation #271669

The result was inevitable. Housed, on their own historic land, in a State which was no State at all because it was not of their own devising, the Irish people have repudiated all responsibility for it, have misused and abused it, and have arisen in a. Continual series of revolts against it. They were morally bound to do so, or become no more a nation but a slave race. Continuing a Nation they were bound to assert their protest; and they have habitually done so very remarkably by the assertion of the laws, meanings and implications of their old State, destroyed centuries ago, as against the forms, meanings and implications of a system of govern ment utterly alien to them. There are few things in history more remarkable or arresting than this challenge of an alien government with the laws and procedures of a State that centuries before had been hewn'asunder, had been trampled under foot, but had continued in the instincts and intuitions of the Nation — the instincts and intuitions that in the'first instance, at the dawn of history, had built that State.