Standish O'Grady; selected essays and passages

IRISH POLITICS AND POLITICAL HISTORY 1 77
To-day we are surrounded by the wrecks and fragments
of this great Irish order, which did such mighty things,
and then sank into slavery to phantoms of their own
creation, so that even adversity could not teach them
Surely we are a great people and deserve to get on !
Now these ludicrous breaks-down—or whatever we
must call them— ^these incredible lapses and aberrations,
exhibited by a people not only as intelligent and spirited
as the average, but more intelligent than the average, at
the time of their occurrence only filled me with amaze-
ment and consternation. I had not then traced to its
source all that folly, nor quite realised how it was the
inevitable outcome and resultant of a cause, operative, in
different forms, through all our tragical history ;
nor did
I connect it with a national fault, perhaps a national
crime which has checked our progress from century to
century, which has brought about the destruction of
aristocracy after aristocracy, and which bids fair, as I
write, to involve us in one common ruin, and leave this
land free for the exploitation of tourist touts and commer-
cial syndicates formed fornhe promotion of sport in waste
countries. For if things continue to go on as they are
going on to-day in Ireland, the Bullock, which is now
superseding man, will himself be superseded by the
wild beast, and the wild bird, which the British and
American sporting plutocracy will pleasantly shoot and
pleasantly pursue, sustained by a little host of Irish
uniformed Gillies.
In such a country, ^nd dominated by such potent
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