Was it fifty years ago, was it a hundred years ago, was the beginning made when Strongbow and his knights crossed the Irish Sea? Centuries before an English foot had trodden Irish soil, Irish kings had been perishing as soon as the crown was settled on their brows. Then who shall place a finger upon any page? There is no place; there was no clean cut beginning.
Never have the gods been kind enough to Ireland to give her a united national opinion, which might have knit her together; nor has Ireland succeeded in absorbing her successive waves of invaders and making them one people. The Celt with his hoary tradition passes through the mists of long ago, driving westward before him the Firbolg, the inarticulate aboriginal of the country. In turn follow other more masculine peoples, sweeping after the Celt, sweeping to the west and the south the melancholy Celt with his age-long memory.
You must go south and west to find the Celt, and to-day you are not likely to find him pure anywhere. But his mark is in many places. This Celtic blood, when blended with other more masculine bloods, makes a rich mixture.
As a result Ireland has become a house with three tenants who are constantly calling upon the landlord—the first to tell him that he requires no repairs to the house and is willing for it to be left as it is; the second declaring that the house is in sad disrepair and that something must be done; the third announcing he will have nothing more to do with such a shameful landlord. Thus the Unionists, the Nationalists, and the Republicans.
The landlord all this while, hearing several opinions and pleading inability to distinguish the right one, does what is easiest and suits him best, and leaves things as they are. It is small excuse that Britain should have been so tardy with justice; but it is probable that she would have been swifter righting Ireland’s wrongs had she heard a united voice in place of many.
The illustration of landlord and tenant suits better than any other; but it smacks unpleasantly of possessor and possessed. Let us be clear. The landlord of Ireland is that single people made out of the four separate peoples of the British Isles.
Let us turn to a more profitable question. When were the beginnings of Sinn Fein?
Who shall say so late in the day what might have checked the growth of this movement? May Sinn Fein have been a distemper which, contracted, must be gone through with? May it have been something altogether different, a coming to rebirth of a people, as the nearly drowned man is brought back to life with pain and tears? Is it that the gods decide such and such a thing shall befall and determine when it shall take place? The Gaelic League went before Sinn Fein like John of old. “After me shall come another mightier than I.” It is sufficient that the movement had a beginning, and like an avalanche gained way as it moved.
First, in 1893, the language movement and talk of a Celtic revival. A Dublin professor becomes inspired, and disciples gather about him to master an antique tongue. Dr. Douglas Hyde, in everyday life a pleasant sociable man, is touched with the geist when he pleads for the Gaelic tongue. The movement grows, pen and pencil are snatched up, and the remotest country-side is explored for folklore and fairy tales. There arrives the Celtic illuminator with his paintbrush and his parchment, and the Celtic jeweller, hammering out his brooches old fashioned a thousand years ago. The prophets awaken—the seers of visions, the dreamers of dreams. One dreams of the avatar that is to come, and sees a phantom drummer drumming about the land. A second, reading a telegram of the Russo-Japanese war, receives the intuition that Japan is the masculine pole of the earth and Ireland is the feminine pole, and that some mystic union of the two peoples will bring order into disorder. A third, on Howth Hill, sees bloody giant figures moving across the sky. A fourth, on the top of a tram, sees letters of fire in the heavens.
The national fire burning more brightly and more steadily. All the while Arthur Griffith’s paper, The United Irishman, calling to the nation to come together.