102
AN GAOḊAL.
A. O. H.
At the biennial Convention of the A. O. H. of
the State of lowa, held in Dubuque last month,
His Honor Mayor Duffy, from the chair, welcom¬
ed the delegates with a gunuine
Ceud mile fáilte,
and, later on Brother Hagerty of Burlington, took
the floor and said. —
"The Irish Language is the voice of an ancient
and honorable people kept in bondage by brute
force.
It is the indistructible casket in which the price¬
less treasures of our history have been securely
locked up from the hand of the spoiler.
It is the life boat of the children of the sea-di¬
vided Gael.
It is the ark of safety that preserves our race
from the fate of the lost tribe of Israel.
It is the one thing that prevents our absorption
by what is ignorantly called "the English peak¬
ing race" — this after-dinner phrase being a histo¬
lical hoax — a literary fraud, for the wall of the
Saxon Chronicle centuries ago informed a pitying
world that "The whole duguth of them perished,"
viz.; at the battle of Hastings, one fine day in Oc¬
tober, 1066, where and when, for the fourth time,
Britannia was conquered, and her people subju¬
gated to an abject slavery never to be overcome.
The Celt increases in numbers, even while his
language is mute; but although the Saxon has
been extinct for 800 years — although the Norman
land-thief "rules the waves," and the money-len¬
der the nations — although Europe, not England,
is our mother — although Uncle Sam differs radi¬
cally from John Bull, the Saxon tongue survives;
hence we, Americans, sovereigns of royal Irish de¬
scent, are dubbed "Anglo-Saxon," because our
speech is English.
The Normans with their British slaves began
the conquest of Ireland in 1169. — The job is still
unfinished. True, after Righ Shamus ran away
from the Boyne in 1690, our ancestors were legis¬
lated into ignorance of their language and of their
glorious past,
"What wonder if our step betrays
The freeman born in penal days,"
and we alone of all the nations forget that "The
tongue of the conqueror in the mouth of the con¬
quered is the tongue of the slave."
The olden tongue was sinking in oblivion until
the discovery of some manuscripts written in the
8th century by some monks in the Abbey of St.
Gall, Switzerland, enabled Zeuss to complete his
famous Grammatica Celtica and O'Curry to give
to the world his Manuscript Material of Irish
History. But now there is no excuse for Irish ig¬
norance; and this is especially true relative to Hi¬
bernians, as the patriotic editor of THE GAEL off¬
ers to supply that journal to every Division of the
Order for one cent a year for each member. From
its pages you may not only learn Irish, but
discover the Gaelic origin of the names of Lon¬
don, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Scotland, Britain, Ca¬
diz, Germany, Greece, Macedon, Carthage, Phe¬
nicia, Armenia, Cabul, Babel, Brazil, Columbia,
and a "slough" of others, including Athens itself.
The survival for 4000 years of what was the
language of a refined, educated people when the
Egyptian was still a barbarian, while the site of the
Acropolis was a stone waste — while the Tiber roll¬
ed yellow mud through the wolf-infested woods
that skired the seven hills that were to be the
seat of the city of Rome — the survival of this an¬
cient tongue, notwithstanding the over-generous
disposition of our race to neglect it and to adopt
the speech of the nations with which they come
in contact, is proof of its superiority to Latin,
Greek and other languages younger than itself,
and which are long since dead and embalmed,
while it is still the living vernacular of the Irish
and the Scottish Gael, the life principle of their
nationality and a necessity to the ethnologists,
philologists and scholars of all races. Having wit¬
nessed the births of all the modern tongues of Eu¬
rope and America, it seems destined to survive
them all, like an unfading olive, which, having
given life, imparts vigor and affords shade and
shelter to the seedlings and saplings around it.
The nomenclature of our race clings to the ev¬
erlasting hills, rushing streams and blue lakes re¬
flecting the
"Skies of poor Erin, our mother,
Where sunshine and shadows are chasing each
other,"
and to those of Asia, Africa, and wherever from
the plains of Tartary to the Rocky Mountains of
America, the wandering Gael has had an abiding
place. But most of our Gaelic names have been
twisted out of recognizable shape by the Romans
and the English, who could neither pronounce
them nor comprehend their meaning. Few sus¬
pect that the term "Cuacassian" is a distortion of
the two Gaelic words, "casan-gava," — path of the
smith — given to the volcanic chain of iron mount¬
ains under which Vulcan was supposed to forge the
bolts of Jupiter. Few reflect that the Greek and
Latin "roots" of our modern languages are deriv¬
atives of those of the Irish tree. Who remembers
that St. Paul honored a branch of our family — the
Chaldeana — by writing to them his First Epistle ?
Yet all these facts are familiar to the masters of
the Irish language, who have the key to the se¬
crets of the ancient and supposed modern history
How did the Prince of Wales spend the $5,000¬
000. which he borrowed from Baron Hirsch? To
buy diamonds and pearls for his "noble" lady
friends ! A nice leader for the English-speaking
race!"
