Irish Nationality

								

stones for his fortress, on a shelf of rock over two thousand feet
above the sea near Tralee. The Dublin Museum preserves relics of that
heroic time, the trappings of war-chariots and horses, arms and
ornaments.
Amid such conflicts the Connacht kings pressed eastward from Usnech to
Tara, and fixed there the centre of Irish life.
The Gaelic conquerors had entered on a wealthy land. Irish chroniclers
told of a vast antiquity, with a shadowy line of monarchs reaching
back, as they boasted, for some two thousand years before Christ: they
had legends of lakes springing forth in due order; of lowlands cleared
of wood, the appearance of rivers, the making of roads and causeways,
the first digging of wells: of the making of forts; of invasions and
battles and plagues. They told of the smelting of gold near the Liffey
about 1500 B.C. and of the Wicklow artificer who made cups and
brooches of gold and silver, and silver shields, and golden chains for
the necks of kings; and of the discovery of dyes, purple and blue and
green, and how the ranks of men were distinguished henceforth by the
colour of their raiment. They had traditions of foreign trade--of an
artificer drowned while bringing golden ore from Spain, and of torques
of gold from oversea, and of a lady's hair all ablaze with Alpine gold.
Later researches have in fact shown that Irish commerce went back some
fifteen hundred years before our era, that it was the most famous
gold-producing country of the west, that mines of copper and silver
were worked, and that a race of goldsmiths probably carried on the
manufacture of bronze and gold on what is now the bog of Cullen. Some
five hundred golden ornaments of old times have been gathered together
in the Dublin Museum in the last eighty years, a scanty remnant of what
have been lost or melted down; their weight is five hundred and seventy
ounces against a weight of twenty ounces in the British Museum from
England, Scotland, and Wales.
The earth too was fruitful. The new settlers, who used iron tools
instead of bronze, could clear forests and open plains for tillage.
Agriculture was their pride, and their legends told of stretches of
corn so great that deer could shelter in them from the hounds, and
nobles and queens drove chariots along their far-reaching lines, while
multitudes of reapers were at work cutting the heads of the grain with
the little sickles which we may still see in the Dublin Museum.
But to the Irish the main interest of the Gaels lies in their
conception of how to create an enduring state or nation.
The tribal system has been much derided as the mark of a savage
people, or at least of a race unable to advance beyond political
infancy into a real national existence. This was not true of the
Gaels. Their essential idea of a state, and the mode of its government
and preservation, was different from that of mediæval Europe, but it
was not uncivilised.
The Roman Empire stamped on the minds of its subject peoples, and on