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Show THE IRISH ARE TO BLAME FATHER YORKE PLEADS FOR INTEREST IN GAELIC. If Ireland Were .. Freed From Continental Con-tinental Languages Her Nationality Nation-ality Might Be Restored. Rev. I'eter C. Yorke, formerly editor of the San Francisco Monitor, lectured in Dublin recently on the Irish language lan-guage movement. His address was forcible and unconventional and his words made a deep impression. He presumed, he said, that they were all agreed that Ireland was a nation, and possesed all the factors that made up a nation. Now, how was poor Ire- I land, and how did she stand? He was afraid that anyone who examined the education, the social, economical, political and even religious condition of Ireland would be compelled to admit that the country had reached a critical period, that the foundations upon j whioh they built were being under-. mined, the anchor on which they relied ' was dragging, and that unless they j were up and doing the day would soon i come when Ireland would be Ireland no j more. If they examined the so-called I national system of so-called education they found from top to bottom its lines were English. The same might be said of the intermediate system of education. edu-cation. " The commissioners had stolen from them two-thirds of the marks for Celtic; nor could they be blamed, for forty-two Catholic colleges did. not send up a single student in Irish, and were it not for the good nuns in the north it would have gone out to the world that the women of Ireland had forgotten the language of St. Bright, and were it not for the Fathers of the Holy Ghost, and for that noble and self-sacrificing and hard-working body of men, the Christian Brothers, Professor Pro-fessor Mahaffy might tomorrow proclaim, pro-claim, like Jack the Giant Killer, "Irish is dead, and I have killed it." As for the newspapers, Irish topics were carefully avoided. In his days they used to get in the Shamrock and the W'eekly Freeman good Irish history and Irish stories, but now the Weekly Freeman and other weekly papers were mada up of clippings from the yellow press of America, and in the hands of the youth of the country they found the colored abominations of the English press. .They had another means of education, namely, the theatres. The Dublin people peo-ple wera supposed to be a theatre-going people. They prided themselves upon their taste in music, and yet today they were content to take the sn,uff that had been filtered through the minds of English doodery, and at the close of : these performances instead of the old j marching tune, "God save Ireland," they listened reverently to "God Save I the Queen.' ! What he said was true, and it was : just as true that it was the fault of the j people of Dublin. What charm could I sTjch an air have for the people of Ire-I Ire-I land. Mingled with its strains rose up in vision the burned roof trees, the peo-. peo-. pie cast upon the road side, the heads of Irish peasants upon the pikes of Cromwell's soldiers, the men who died by the hands of the assassin, and who were poisoned, lying in their shrouds, all rose up before their eyes. It called up views of the long procession of Irish exiles from north, south,' east and west, who set out from Ireland. . Ireland was not like other nations. For 600 years she' had been as a vine- I yard whose walls were broken down) and through whose paths the plunder- i ers had swept. Every greedy adventurer adven-turer had only to come over to Ireland te fill his purse, and were it not that God had intended that Ireland should be a nation, and should still continue j to be a. nation, he did not believe that they would be able to survive at all. I I If they went to work to build up Irish nationality they would have to take stronger measures than ordinary under the circumstances. He believed that if a wall of brass, as Dean Swift said, were built 1,000 feet high round Ireland, Ire-land, it would be for the benefit of her people. He believed that if thev could I tow Ireland into the Atlantic ocean and free it entirely from English and continental languages) that such a measure would not be too much to restore re-store to Ireland her diminishing nationality. na-tionality. They could not do those things. ere they going to allow their nationality nation-ality to be taken away from them? The mind was the noblest part of man, and if they had Irish minds they would surely have Irish bodies, and if they could learn to think Irish thoughts and speak the Irish tongue, and if they could bring up their children, in the I Irish language, and if they should regard re-gard the English as other languages, as foreign, but of course still carry the i. V , ce .r the Poetical men. and the turtle voice of Professor Mahaffv hlKtP the tht Irish was not worth the bother, and that Irish people would ose nothing if the whole of the Irish language was thrown into Dublin bay, That fallacy had been, well exploded by HydT?' bDr-Hickey, and by such men as Dp. Heneberry in America. . Outside the Sanscrit literature there was none so unique, so beautiful or so instructive, or so full of human interest as the old Irish literature, and what was more, it was the language of the Irish people themselves. The Irish people, were not the sons of beaten subjects who had to be licked into shape by the Romans. Their language was their own. and what was Irish was best for Irishmen, and therefore when Irish was what Professor Mahaffy asserted it Wa,S, .r"ot- il was for Irishmen the noblest dialect spoken by the mouth of man. It was their mother tongue, and it was the best language for Irishmen who loved their mother. But they w ere told by the practical man that the teaching of English was necessary for those who emigrated to America and to other parts of the world. It was a well known fact that no country could be progressive whose children left their native shores in thousands every year, but even on the question of emigration he denied that the knowledge of English gave Irishmen Irish-men any advantage over Germans, Poles or any other nationalities. The only difference he saw between the representatives of those foreien rations, ra-tions, who had to learn the English, and the Irishmen, who had not. was the evidence of intellectual sihtstpcH-l-o- ness on the part of the Irishman, because be-cause he only knew the one tongue. If the Gaelic movement progressed as it should be (the lecturer) could tell them that position after position would spring up that would demand the services serv-ices of Irish-speaking people and then the practical men who stood aloof would be compelled to acknowledge that they made a mistake, and that Irish was a paying concern. Now the question for consideration was this, was it p6ssible to bring back a language so dear to its people as the Irish language? He believed in the first place that nothing that the Irish people put their minds to was impossible. impos-sible. He was not now giving thean what was called at the other side taffey or soft soap. AVhen the Irish people took matters properly in hand, what appeared ap-peared up to them impossibilities became be-came not only possible, but actually clear facts. This was a people's work. He had no faith in leaders. He did not believe in the policy "follow my leader." It was no use to trust to the national schools or to the intermediate. They should remember that the state did not come first in education, but that the parents did, and if parents would insist that their children were sent to schools in which Irish was an obligatory subject, in a few years the scandal such as they had seen in the recent intermediate inter-mediate results would disappear. If the Irish . people were in earnest they, would ' find "the. Irish language movement growing and prospering. The clergy of Ireland deserved Well from the Irish people. He challenged any one to point to a body of men in such numbers and in such positions that stood by their people more nobly than the Irish priesthood by them. But their standing by the people did not stand by them. The people stood by the priests; they went into the desert of the penal laws with them, and now the Irish people had a right to turn to the Irish priest and say there is now another ideal of building up again the I wealth of cur nationhood, of spreading the language of the Irish race, and the Irish people required the Irish priests to stand by them in achieving that ideai. If Irishmen were only true to themselves that end would be accomplished accom-plished despite all opposition. They would hear the ring of the Irish tongue once more all over the land, the same tongue that echoed through the ruined abbeys, and that filled the ancient cloisters in the days) of old. It is not by unfounded attack and contemptible innuendo that the Gaelic movement i3 to be served. It has been the curse of that movement for half a century or more that it has been sacrificed sacri-ficed to the hates and squabbles of its so-called friends. The country branches of the Gaelic League will need to look to it, or the same fate will overtake the league that overtook the Ossianic society and the Gaelic Urion, and the same paralyis that checked the progress prog-ress of the Society for the Preservation i of the Irish Language. Already the league has been made the vehicle for an attack upon an. Irishman who has the nationality of Ireland at heart, and given more of his substance to make it a reality than a thousand of his assailants. assail-ants. Now it is used to assail one of the couple of newspapers in Ireland that has made sacrifices for the propa- 1 ganda. The movement has many obstacles ob-stacles to contend with, but the greatest are some of its conductors. |
