8 IRISH SPELLING 



such a man in Dublin I should like to meet him and to 

 .shake hands with him. 



The idea of geometric progression in the movement was, 

 of course, quite delusive. At the end of the second year 

 you may find one hundred fresh members, but by this 

 time eighty or ninety of the first batch have lost heart, 

 lost interest, and fallen away, and the increase is now at 

 the rate of 10 per cent, per annum, not 10,000. Has the 

 average branch of the Gaelic League in such a place as 

 Dublin been able to keep up even this increase of 10 per 

 cent. ? a modest increase, truly, for those who mean to 

 alter the map of the country. No ; Irish may disappear 

 from a whole countryside in one generation. That has 

 happened, and is still happening. But to Gaelicize the 

 Pale will take far more than a generation. 



The only possible battle-ground is the Irish-speaking 

 districts. In many of these Irish is simply dying as fast 

 as it can, faster even than the older generation of native 

 speakers. In others the language is said to have a chance 

 of holding its own. But I wish to point out that the 

 character of these latter districts is rapidly changing. At 

 present there is still a certain percentage who speak Irish 

 only. These are invaluable depositaries of idiom, phonetics, 

 tradition, and so on, but you cannot rely on them for help 

 in the future, because there will be no such class in 

 existence. The people who speak Irish only to-day are 

 not those who have deliberately chosen Irish, but those 

 who have not had the chance of learning English. And 

 does anyone here imagine that in these days of compulsory 

 education, and inspection, and industrial movements, and 

 agricultural societies, any child born in Ireland this year 

 is destined to grow to maturity without learning English ? 

 Apart from the question whether this is morally or edu- 

 cationally desirable, will such a thing be physically possible ? 

 Why, the very bilingual schools for which you have been 

 fighting will settle that matter. Believe me, unless a 

 radical alteration is made in our methods, in a few years 

 Ireland will be divided into two main districts. In the 

 first, comprising nine-tenths of the whole country, English 



