On Tuesday, Sir Theodore Martin delivered a very able address
on national sentiment at the Royal Institution, Liver- pool, in which he pointed out what a misfortune it had been that the Irish took to brooding over their national wrong, instead of, like the Scots, making the best of the inevitable, and seizing every advantage the connection with England gave them, " while, at the same time, not losing one jot of wholesome national sentiment." What makes a nationality P he asked. " Is it not mainly the necessity for cohesion against a common enemy ? " Sir Theodore Martin might have gone on to point out that the Irish never seem to have felt this necessity, and that there has never been a true Irish Nationality. Not only did none of the Irish Kinglets ever gain complete supremacy over the rest before the English invasion, but even as late as the seventeenth century they could not combine to fight us. The obedience yielded to Mr. Parnell before the split was the nearest approach to cohesion in Irish history, and even that left out all the Protestants. Sir Theodore Martin ended his address by quoting Sir Henry Maine's remark that Nationalism " seems full of the seeds of future civil convulsions."
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