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timent to inflict than that which I should feel if, after a life passed in England, or America, or the Colonies, I were to come back to my native mountains and find that the indifference or the actual discouragement of our leaders had succeeded in destroying the language of my childhood, and with it the tales, the traditions, the legends, the imaginations with which my cradle had been surrounded.
“I do not think it would be for the advantage of our race to let our language die. I affirm without hesitation that those who continue to speak their own language are in every way the intellectual, and generally the moral, superiors of those who have allowed it to die out. When a locality has allowed Irish to die out the people lose nearly all those distinctive characteristics which make them so lovable and so courteous. I have verified this over and over again, and feel sure I am asserting the truth. The reason of it is transparently obvious. When they lose the language they lose also the traditional unwritten literature which, inculcating and eulogising what is courteous, high-minded, and noble, supplied continuously an incentive to the practice of those qualities . . . .
“Wherever Irish is the vernacular of the people there live enshrined in it memories and imaginations, deeds of daring, and tragic catastrophes, an heroic cycle of legend and poem, a vast and varied store of apothegms, sententious proverbs, and weighty sentences, which contain the very best and truest thoughts, not of the rude forefathers of the hamlet, but of the kings, sages, bards, and shanachies of bygone ages. Such a stream of collected thought as is everywhere found where the Irish language remains spoken must exercise an influence on those who come into contact with it, and such an influence must be an advantageous one. . . .
“If by ceasing to speak Irish our peasantry could learn
