To return, however, to the special charges urged against Gaelic life in Ireland. The island may be the same, and the race of ancient date, and with no less than their ancient pride; but what of that, if the people could not have, nor ever did have, a polity of their own, nor any Irish institutions nor an Irish idea of government? “The fiction has been assiduously propagated,” says a Unionist writer in the _Morning Post_, “by the Irish extreme section ... that the nationhood of Ireland is a thing which once had an actual objective existence.... But such teaching, however romantically attractive, is simply incompatible with the plain facts of history. Ireland as a political entity dates from the period of the conquest by England, when for the first time the princes and chieftains with their followers were fused into something like national unity.” So Macedon might have boasted that for the first time it had put some order into Greece, given it a political entity, and brought it into line with modern Imperial civilization. Is this unhistoric statement all the Unionists have in the end got to give us of the Irish story? Is there nothing behind it—no trace of any soul of the people in Ireland? How then was it that with so incomplete a military or political organization, they could defy for centuries the whole power of England? Ireland in fact drew her strength from a remarkable State system of her own. In the Gaelic form of civilization the national sentiment did not gather round a military king, as in the Teutonic states, but round a common learning, literature, and tradition; and this exalted belief in the spiritual existence of a nation, though it is not the English idea of a kingdom, may belong nevertheless to a high order of human aspiration. It produced in Ireland a literature which has not been surpassed among any people for its profound and ardent sense of nationality.