THE IRISH NATIONAL IDEA

From Irish Ideas by William O'Brien, 1893

Page 6

THE IRISH NATIONAL IDEA

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Conquering nations of the coarse material texture of the ancient Romans and the modern English have never been able to understand why little nations like Ireland should cling to their own hopes and ideals, instead of embracing the new gods and scrambling for their share of the worldwide empire which they have had the same share in building up that the hundreds of thousands of slaves who perished under King Rameses' lash had in building the Great Pyramid. I have no doubt that King Xerxes' courtiers were just as much disgusted at Leonidas' folly in standing to be killed in the Pass of Thermopylae, with his absurd little mob of three hundred men, instead of sensibly coming over to dinner with the glittering hosts of the Persians and sharing the good things that were going, as the ordinary Englishman is with our obstinacy in dreaming of a National Parliament, instead of learning sense and taking our pull out of the Hindoos and carrying all before us in the Civil Service. But, as a matter of historical fact, it is to small States that the world owes its laws, its fine arts, its learning, its religion, its music, its paintings, and all the finer elements of its civilisation, while the great military empires of the Macedonians, and the Persians, and the Scythians, and the Tartars have passed over the earth and left no traces but hecatombs of bones. Furthermore, I cannot recall a single instance in which the genius of a small State has been successfully transfused into the more splendid empires which absorbed them. The little State which gave the world Aristotle, and Socrates, and Demosthenes, and Praxiteles, while its genius was nursed in freedom within a territory less than that of the county of Cork, produced nothing better than the Graeculi esurientes —the little Greek pimps of Roman satire—when its enslaved children were bribed to Rome to minister to the … continue reading »

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