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We have been told that there are two nations in Ireland. That may have been so in the past, but it is not true today. The union of Norman and Dane and Saxon and Celt which has been going on through the centuries is now completed, and there is but one powerful Irish character–not Celtic or Norman-Saxon, but a new race. We should recognize our moral identity. It was apparent before the war in the methods by which Ulstermen and Nationalists alike strove to defend or win their political objects. There is scarce an Ulsterman, whether he regards his ancestors as settlers or not, who is not allied through marriage by his forbears to the ancient race. There is in his veins the blood of the people who existed before Patrick, and he can look backward through time to the legends of the Red Branch, the Fianna and the gods as the legends of his people. It would be as difficult to find even on the Western Coast a family which has not lost in the same way its Celtic purity of race. The character of all is fed from many streams which have mingled in them and have given them a new distinctiveness. The invasions of Ireland and the Plantations, however morally unjustifiable, however cruel in method, are justified by biology. The invasion of one race by another was nature’s ancient way of reinvigorating a people.

Mr. Flinders Petrie, in his “Revolutions of Civilization,” has demonstrated that civilization comes in waves, that races rise to a pinnacle of power and culture, and decline from that, and fall into decadence, from which they do not emerge until there has been a crossing of races, a fresh intermingling of cultures. He showed in ancient Egypt eight such periods, and after every decline into decadence there was an invasion, the necessary precedent to a fresh ascent with reinvigorated energies. I prefer to dwell upon the final human results of this commingling of races than upon the tyrannies and conflicts which made it possible. The mixture of races has added to the elemental force of the Celtic character a more complex mentality, and has saved us from becoming, as in our island isolation we might easily have become, thin and weedy, like herds where there has been too much in-breeding. The modern Irish are a race built up from many races who have to prove themselves for the future. Their animosities, based on past history, have little justification in racial diversity today, for they are a new people with only superficial cultural and political differences, but with the same fundamental characteristics. It is hopeless, the dream held by some that the ancient Celtic character could absorb the new elements, become dominant once more, and be itself unchanged. It is equally hopeless to dream the Celtic element could be eliminated. We are a new people, and not the past, but the future, is to justify this new nationality.

I believe it was this powerful Irish character which stirred in Ulster before the war, leading it to adopt methods unlike the Anglo-Saxon tradition in politics. I believe that new character, far more than the spirit of the ancient race, was the ferment in the blood of those who brought about the astonishing enterprise of Easter Week. Pearse himself, for all his Gaelic culture, was sired by one of the race he fought against. He might stand in that respect as a symbol of the new race which is springing up. We are slowly realizing the vigor of the modern Irish character just becoming self-conscious of itself. I had met many men who were in the enterprise of Easter Week and listened to their spirit their speech, but they had to prove to myself and others by more than words. I listened with that half-cynical feeling which is customary with us when men advocate a cause with which we are temperamentally sympathetic, but about whose realization we are hopeless. I could not gauge the strength of the new spirit, for words do not by themselves convey the quality of power in men; and even when the reverberations from Easter Week were echoing everywhere in Ireland, for a time I, and many others, thought and felt about those who died as some pagan concourse in ancient Italy might have felt looking down upon an arena, seeing below a foam of glorious faces turned to them, the noble, undismayed, inflexible faces of martyrs, and, without understanding, have realized that this spirit was stronger than death. I believe that capacity for sacrifice, that devotion to ideals exists equally among the opponents of these men. It would have been proved in Ireland, in Ulster, if the need had arisen. It has been proved on many a battlefield of Europe. Whatever views we may hold about the relative value of national or Imperial ideals, we may recognize that there is moral equality where the sacrifice is equal. No one has more to give than life, and, when that is given, neither Nationalist nor Imperialist in Ireland can claim moral superiority for the dead champions of their causes.