Since its inception the Gaelic League has influenced, in one way or another, the best of the young men and women of Ireland. It has set them thinking, with the language firm in them. And it has led them irresistibly to disregard altogether the whole current of Irish evolution since 1800, to realise that when Ireland began to lose her language she began to lose her Nationality, and to send them back to take up the broken thread of Irish civilisation where the English onrush broke it, and rebuild it. That force has worked just as all-embracingly as the English aggressive onrush of the nineteenth century worked. It has neglected nothing. And while the older politicians went on in their well-worn grooves, uneasy at the apathy of the young people towards them, but ignorantly content so long as they were undisturbed, the leaven of the Gaelic League self-reliance principle was undermining their political foundations, in common with all other foundations in Ireland which were the result of a bastard connexion with any of the manifestations of English civilisation in Ireland. That is also the secret of the Irish Literary Movement in English. It gets its inspiration from Irish tradition, Irish convention, Irish speech, and even though it expresses itself in English it is an English which is half Irish. Its whole spirit is the spirit of an Ireland which is looking back to Eoghan Ruadh and Keating rather than forward to a development of the perfectly reputable, perfectly colourless, and perfectly uninspiring work of, say, Mr. Edward Dowden. That work is the work of a mind perfectly assimilated to English civilisation, and it has no future save absorption. The Gaelic League leaven has driven it home to the people of Ireland that any similar work or effort in any sphere has no future save absorption, and it has sent them, in everything, in literature, politics, economics, back to their native culture and its traditions. CHAPTER III THE GENESIS OF THE SINN FEIN MOVEMENT