Up to the Sinn Fein Movement Irish Patriotic Movements have all been specialist rather than comprehensive. They aimed at political freedom, or they aimed at the control of the land, or they had some definite one object which at the time stood for everything, and often they mistook the one thing for the whole. Their non-comprehensiveness has been made a reproach to them in certain Nationalist speculations of recent years, but this cannot with justice be done. The first thing which Ireland lost was her political independence and naturally it was the thing she then tried to recover. She had not lost her language, or her culture, or her memory, and naturally she could only frame a movement for the recovery of what she had actually lost. In the eighteenth century, which in some ways was the darkest, she was yet much more of a Nation than ever she was in the nineteenth; for, even though her thoughts in that century were directed to the bare hope of keeping herself alive, of not starving and not becoming a herd of illiterates and degenerates, even then her full National consciousness went on, _en rapport_ with her past and undisturbed in the broad sense by the froth and fustian of the Garrison persecutions: and at the end of the century she had lost nothing but her political independence and her ownership of the land. The nineteenth century, therefore, saw her devoted to the recovery of these two things, of the loss of which she was conscious; and the closing years of the century, which brought her the perception of the loss of other things, of language and all that goes with it, brought with them for the first time the possibility of a comprehensive movement for the recovery of everything lost, for an attack upon the dominant civilisation at every point of contact. And the twentieth century brought the movement itself in the Sinn Fein movement.