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scurity. All our great scholars, nearly all those who have done anything for the elucidation of our MSS.—O'Connor, of Ballinagar, O'Donovan, O'Curry, Petrie, Hennessy—all these spoke the language naturally from their cradle, and had it not been so they would never have been able to accomplish the work they did, a work which first made it possible for a Jubainville or a Windisch to prosecute their Celtic studies with any success.
“There is no use in arguing the advantage of making Irish the language of our newspapers and clubs, because that is and ever will be an impossibility; but for several reasons we wish to arrest the language in its downward path, and if we cannot spread it (as I do not believe we very much can), we will at least prevent it from dying out, and make sure that those who speak it now shall also transmit it unmodified to their descendants. . . .
“To be told that the language which I spoke from my cradle, the language of my father and grandfather, and all my ancestors in an unbroken line leading up into the remote twilight of antiquity, have spoken; the language which has entwined itself with every fibre of my being, helped to mould my habits of conduct and forms of thought; to be calmly told by an Irish journal that the sooner I give up this language the better; that the sooner I ‘leave it to the universities’ the better; that we will improve our English speaking by giving up our Irish: to be told this by a representative Irish journal is naturally and justly painful.
“I do not think the Saxon language has greater claims upon the western peasantry, or on myself, than the Irish language has, or that we should be told to give up the tongue of our fathers that we may better speak the language of strangers . . .
“I cannot conceive a more acute pain in the power of sen-
