Since the great debacle of their race the Celtic remnants have continued to speak one or other of the dialects bequeathed from their ancestors. Five of these are living tongues. Apart from the number that speak them abroad, it is estimated there are upwards of 3,000,000 people in Brittany and the British Isles whose mother tongue is Celtic. The distribution and proportion, according to the latest available statistics,[6] are full of interest, in view of the long struggle for existence of the language and people, and the extraordinary vitality they have evinced in defying the tooth of time. These facts may be crisply tabulated thus:— Gaelic.[7] 254,415. Chiefly in the Highlands of Scotland. Irish. 679,145. West of a line in Ireland from Dungarvon Bay to Loch Swilly. Manx. 3,000. West Coast, Isle of Man. Welsh. 900,000. Over Wales. Cornish. Extinct. Formerly Cornwall. Breton. 1,300,000. In Brittany, N.W. corner of France. A sadly dwindling minority are these fag-ends of once so mighty a race. There can be no doubt that we see the isolated parts gradually expiring on the horizon, and with more accelerated speed within the last few decades than for centuries before. Modern industrialism now woos them away from the strongholds of their own characteristic life, and the separate units get absorbed in the common national life and the common civilisation. Numbers of them—of the Irish especially—are still seeking a home, following the hereditary instincts of their ancestors, and hiving westwards to America, only to lose their distinctive Celtic existence and to be merged in the larger life of that great nation. The facts are sufficiently patent, but to show the rapidity with which the disintegration is going on it may be mentioned that since 1851, 3,925,133 persons have emigrated from Ireland alone—a number larger than that of all the remaining Celtic-speaking population in Europe. In 1899 the number was 43,760; in 1900, 47,107; in 1901, 39,870, the vast majority of whom were from the western Irish-speaking provinces; and, as in the depopulation of the Highlands, it is largely a drain of the best blood, the land being left in the hands of the old and the feeble. There are those who still write and dream of laying the foundations of a new Celtic civilisation, but in view of the present subtle and swift dissolution it is hard to know what they mean, unless indeed it be a leavening of the existing civilisation by a recrudescence of the Celtic spirit and Celtic aspirations. In the main the race has already become fused with the population of Europe, disappearing as Gallo-Grecians in the east, as Celt-Iberians in Spain, as Gallo-Franks and Anglo-Celts in the north-west—all but the Celtic fringes that are shedding their past.