Irish Nationality

								

multitudinous centres of discussion scattered over the island, and the
rapid intercourse of all these centres one with another, explain how
learning broadened, and how Christianity spread over the land like a
flood. It was to these country settlements that the Irish owed the
richness of their civilisation, the generosity of their learning, and
the passion of their patriotism.
Ireland was a land then as now of intense contrasts, where equilibrium
was maintained by opposites, not by a perpetual tending towards the
middle course. In things political and social the Irish showed a
conservatism that no intercourse could shake, side by side with eager
readiness and great success in grasping the latest progress in arts or
commerce. In their literature strikingly modern thoughts jostle
against the most primitive crudeness; "Vested interests are shameless"
was one of their old observations. In Ireland the old survived beside
the new, and as the new came by free assimilation old and new did not
conflict. The balance of opposites gave colour and force to their
civilisation, and Ireland until the thirteenth century and very
largely until the seventeenth century, escaped or survived the
successive steam rollings that reduced Europe to nearly one common
level.
In the Irish system we may see the shaping of a true democracy--a
society in which ever-broadening masses of the people are made
intelligent sharers in the national life, and conscious guardians of
its tradition. Their history is throughout a record of the nobility of
that experiment. It would be a mechanical theory of human life which
denied to the people of Ireland the praise of a true patriotism or the
essential spirit of a nation.

CHAPTER II
IRELAND AND EUROPE
c. 100--c. 600

The Roman Agricola had proposed the conquest of Ireland on the ground
that it would have a good effect on Britain by removing the spectacle
of liberty. But there was no Roman conquest. The Irish remained
outside the Empire, as free as the men of Norway and Sweden. They
showed that to share in the trade, the culture, and the civilisation
of an empire, it is not necessary to be subject to its armies or lie
under its police control. While the neighbouring peoples received a
civilisation imposed by violence and maintained by compulsion, the
Irish were free themselves to choose those things which were suited to
their circumstances and character, and thus to shape for their people
a liberal culture, democratic and national.
It is important to observe what it was that tribal Ireland chose, and
what it rejected.
There was frequent trade, for from the first century Irish ports were
well known to merchants of the Empire, sailing across the Gaulish sea
in wooden ships built to confront Atlantic gales, with high poops
standing from the water like castles, and great leathern sails--stout
hulls steered by the born sailors of the Breton coasts or the lands of