“ It is recognized the world over that Irish art has a beauty and distinction all its own, in its own Irish setting unrivalled, throned in its own land, in its own natural surroundings. The shrines and gospels, the reliquaries and missals, the crosses and bells that are still existent, many in Ireland, others in every country in the world, attest beyond any dispute that Irish art-workers held a preëminent place in the early middle ages, and that works of Irish art are still treasured as unique in their day and time. No country has been plundered and desolated as Ireland has been. ”

“ It matters not which horse, man, car, cycle, boat, or team is successful: the sport is the thing that counts; the strenuousness of the contest is what stimulates and evokes the rapturous applause. At such a moment it is good to be alive. Scenes similar to those hinted at may be witnessed on any sports-field or racetrack in our dear little Emerald Isle almost any day of the year. All is good fellowship; all is in the cause of sport.
No one can question that in some departments of horse-racing Ireland is today supreme. The Irish devotion to the horse is of no recent growth. ”

“ Wherever an Irishman has fought in the name of Ireland it has not been to acquire fortune, land, or fame, but to give all, even life itself, not to found an empire, but to strike a blow for an ancient land and assert the cause of a swordless people. Wherever Irishmen have gone, in exile or in fight, they have carried this image of Ireland with them. ”

“ This was the time when the High Crosses of Ireland were carved and set up. They vie with the Round Towers in interest and in the display of skill. What the towers have in perfection, masonry and construction, the crosses have in artistic carving and symbolic design. No two crosses are alike; they are as varied as the clouds in an Irish sky or the pebbles on the beach or the flowers in a garden. ”

“ Even as this chronicle of daring deeds and daring doers is being penned, in the ranks and as commanding officers on the side of the allies in the far-flung battle lines of the great European war, are men of Irish birth, and, let it not be forgotten, not a few of the opposing side are the descendants of the Irish military geniuses who, in days gone by, fought so gallantly across the continent "from Dunkirk to Belgrade". They are all, every man of them, bearing bravely, as of yore, their own part amid the dangers and chances of the fray. ”

“ Is the American Republic in any way indebted to those Irish citizens? Have they with their large numbers, high social standing, great places of trust, contributed aught to her glory or added aught to her commercial greatness, refined her social taste or assisted in laying the foundations of the real happiness of her people, the real security of her laws, the influence of her civic virtues, which more than anything else give power and permanency to a naissant and mighty nation? ”

“ Irish wars, throughout all time, have been only against one enemy, the invader, and, ending so often in material disaster, they have conferred always a moral gain. Their memory uplifts the Irish heart; for no nation, no people, can reproach Ireland with having wronged them.
When, at the dawn of the Christian era, we first hear of Ireland from external sources, we learn of it as an island harboring free men, whose indomitable love of freedom was hateful to the spirit of imperial exploitation. ”

“ Dean Swift was the mightiest journalist that ever stirred the sluggish soul of humanity. Were he alive today and had he at his command the enormous circulation of a great daily newspaper, he would keep millions in a perpetual mental ferment, such was the ferocious indignation into which he was aroused by wrong and injustice and his gift of savage ironical expression. Swift, as a young student in Trinity College, Dublin, saw the birth of the first offspring of the Irish mind in journalism. ”

“ In the dark ages of Europe, whilst new civilizations were in the making and all was unrest, art and religion, like the lamp of the sanctuary, burned brightly and steadily in Ireland, and their rays penetrated the outer gloom. Scattered through the libraries of Europe are the priceless manuscripts limned by Irish scribes. The earliest missionaries to the continent, disciples of St. Columbanus and St. Gall, doubtless brought with them into exile beautiful books which they or their brothers of the parent monastery had wrought in a labor of love ”

“ Our civilization is old, but it has not yet lived its full life. If we wish, the future is ours. And let us truly believe that that is worth while, for the race which has produced epics like those of Ossian and all that magnificent literature which has been preserved for us through the ages, the race that gave to Europe that great impulse of missionary activity which is associated with the names of Columcille, Brendan, Columbanus, and Gall, not to mention men like the famous Scotus Erigena—that race is certainly called upon to play an important part in the modern world. ”

“ The hedge-school in its most elemental state was an open-air daily assemblage of youths in pursuit of knowledge. Inasmuch as the law had refused learning a fitting temple in which to abide and be honored, she was led by her votaries into the open, and there, beside the fragrant hedge, if you will, with the green sward for benches, and the canopy of heaven for dome, she was honored in Ireland, even as she had been honored ages before in Greece, in Palestine, and by our primordial Celtic ancestors themselves. ”

“ Ireland alone among all western nations knows her own past, from the very dawn of history and before the romance of Romulus began, down to the present day, in the tongue of her own island people and in the light of her own native mind. Early Irish history is not the record of the clan-strivings of a petty and remote population, far from the centre of civilization. ”

“ We thus reach an Ireland which, in a sense, has neither culture nor language, a country in which the Gaelic spoken by a people humiliated and deeply demoralized by an anti-Catholic legislation, which was both savage and degrading, tended to coalesce with an English already condemned to death. It is from the moment when the Catholics had finally triumphed over persecution that we must date the beginning of that political struggle with which we are familiar, a struggle which has resulted in absorbing all the energies of a great part of the population. ”

“ Never did a champion leave his followers at his death and decline to more terrible despair. Friend and foe admit his immensity. He was the greatest Irishman that ever lived or seemingly could live. In his own person he contained the whole genius of the Celt. Ireland could not hold his emotions, which overflowed into the world for expression. He rose on the crest of a religious agitation, but, Emancipation won, he had the foresight to associate the Irish cause with the advent of Reform and Liberalism throughout Europe. ”

“ It is true that a continuation of the hitherto existing state of war cannot do us much more harm; that for purposes of mere destruction all the advantages are on our side; and that on the other hand we can begin a reconstruction at home without waiting for a treaty of peace to be signed. But we have some things to do for which a home government would be useful to us, and further, in the absence of such a government, it would be difficult to imagine what means could be employed to turn the people away from their too exclusive absorption in Anglo-Irish politics. ”

“ The ruins of Ireland are her proudest monuments. They stand as a lasting revelation to all mankind—a distinct and definite proclamation that the Irish people, century after century, were able to raise and adorn some of the finest buildings in stone that western civilization has seen or known. ”

“ He was the last pagan king of Ireland. In perhaps a score of years after the death of Dathi, all Ireland had been converted to Christianity, and its old religion of a thousand years buried so deep that scholars find the greatest difficulty in recovering anything about it. This conservative, obstinate, jealous people overturned its pagan altars in a night, and, ever since, has never put into anything else the devotion, soul and body, of its sacrifices for religion. Christianity profoundly modified Irish life, softened manners, and stimulated learning. ”

“ With the passing of the mid-nineteenth-century writers, the old movement waned, and in the field of Irish letters there was, in the phrase of a famous bull, nothing stirring but stagnation. A witty critic of the period, commenting upon this unhappy state of affairs, declared that, though the love of learning in Ireland might still be, as the saying went, indestructible, it was certainly imperceptible. But after the fall of Parnell a new spirit was stirring. Politics no longer absorbed the whole energy of the nation. Groups of men inspired with a love of the arts sprang up here and there. ”

“ I claim for the Irish race that throughout their history they have cut down their bodily necessities to the quick, in order to devote time and energy to the pursuit of knowledge; that they have engaged in intellectual pursuits, not infrequently of a high order, on a low basis of material comfort; that they have persevered in the quest of learning under unparalleled hardships and difficulties, even in the dark night of "a nation's eclipse", when a school was an unlawful assembly and school-teaching a crime. ”

“ This episode in the history of the Irish in Australia pays a touchingly eloquent tribute to the spirit of loyalty to God and country which has characterized the sons and daughters of St. Patrick everywhere whither their feet have strayed. It is the spirit which has embodied itself in the imposing cathedral of St. Patrick in Melbourne and the splendidly equipped college of St. Patrick in Sydney. It is the spirit which has made the Irish play so conspicuous a role in the civic and commercial history of Australasia. ”

“ It is impossible to overrate the importance of this for the history of Europe, because neither Teutons nor Slavs have preserved pictures of their own heroic past, dating from pagan times. It is only the Celts, and of these the Irish, who have handed down such pictures drawn with all the fond intimacy of romance, and descriptions which exhibit the life of western Europeans at an even earlier culture-stage in the evolution of humanity than do the poems of Homer. ”

“ English shipping held the sea; the English mint the coinage. The purse of England, compared to that of the Ulster princes, was inexhaustible. Yet for nine years the courage, the chivalry, the daring and skill of these northern clansmen, perhaps 20,000 men in all, held all the might of England at bay. Had the Spanish king at any time during the contest made good his promise to lend effective aid to the Irish princes, O'Neill would have driven Elizabeth from Ireland, and a sovereign State would today be the guardian of the freedom of the western seas for Europe and the world. ”

“ Ireland stands conspicuous among the nations of the universe, a solitary instance in which neither the destructive hand of time, nor the devastating arm of oppression, nor the widest variety of changes in the political system of government could alter or subdue, much less wholly extinguish, the national genius, spirit, and character of its inhabitants. ”

“ In our conflict with the English we are not wearied; rather are we hardened for the fray. We have acquired the habit of fighting, and many of us can now scarcely regulate our conduct in a manner suitable to a state of peace with England. Nevertheless, as I have already said, we have not emerged unscathed from this war of the centuries. National sentiment remains with us, no doubt, and our traditions are not wholly lost, especially among the country people of the West. But our commerce is almost ruined and the national language is no longer spoken throughout the greater part of the country. ”