A Nation is crowned when it exists in the world not only by virtue of a continuing national life, sustained by history and limited by natural frontiers, but also by reason of a State in which its intuitions and desires are expressed in a form as flexible as its containing life. The stubbornest national sense--and nowhere in the world has that sense proved more stubborn than in Ireland--can only be said to exist as a protest, rather than as a power, until it can take to itself that eventful crown. No other nation, or combination of nations, or empires or dominions, can give it that crown. It must beat it out of its own sense of wisdom and equity and beauty. It can only be responsible to its own soul and intellectual life for the manner of that crown, not only because in no other sense can the word responsibility be said to apply, but also because of a certain inevitable result. For when a Nation does so crown itself the whole body of the Nation takes on a new dignity and grace. It is inevitable; the wearing of the crown compels a new comportment. But if a crown wrought in some other workshop and made according to some other nation’s desires be pressed upon its brow the whole result must necessarily be ungainly and disfiguring. If there is no responsibility in the making there can be no responsibility in the wearing, and there is no morality at the beginning or in the end. Yet if a Nation can clothe itself in its own responsibility, and wear a crown of its own devising, that Nation is no more only a Nation; it is a Sovereign State. Ireland is not a Sovereign State, but only a nation. Once she was a Sovereign State, and the result was so comely and so full of responsibility that when her sister states were ravaged by barbarian inroads from the north and east she went out among them and rebuilt their faith and culture. Nearly all modern European culture and learning rest on what Ireland wrought during the sixth seventh and eighth centuries, not on the earlier Roman and Greek cultures, for the link with these things was only maintained through Ireland. It was so maintained because Ireland was a Sovereign State, secure in its sovereignty. That sovereignty was suppressed, that statehood was broken, because of the lust of imperial conquest fashioned out of military strength and resting always on that strength. Piece by piece that state was taken and hammered into dust, with a malignancy and hatred very hard to understand, until the people, driven forth into the mountains and waste places of their own land, had no longer any part of their own State in which to house themselves, had to rely on a continuing national sense, fed partly by faith, enriched by old memories, burnt by a suffering hardly to be paralleled in history, but in itself something quite peculiar and indefinable.