THE WORLD’S DEBT TO THE IRISH 
one Irish Sisterhood doing great good work all over 
the world. All this is the result of less than a single 
hundred years of organization. They anticipated 
Florence Nightingale and indeed gave her the incen- 
tive that stimulated her to bring into existence the 
modern trained nurse. Their story enables the mod- 
ern reader to understand when it might otherwise 
be difficult just how the great Irish missionary move- 
ment of over a thousand years ago took place. 
It has been said that the Irish are the most un- 
mixed race in Europe and can trace their ancestry 
for several thousand years better than any other 
people of Europe. The more one knows of them, 
the clearer it becomes that they have continued to 
be the same people essentially all down their history. 
The Irish who 1500 years ago brought back to 
Europe culture and civilization are the same racial 
stock as those who at the end of the nineteenth 
century, when decadence in dramatics and poetry had 
come to modern civilization, brought in a whole 
series of new ideas that have proved most effective 
and stimulating to writers of other nations to bring 
out the best that was in them. That stimulus to 
poetry and the drama came out of the very heart 
of the people and originated with those who partici- 
pated most in the Irish nature, who had retained all 
their primitive simplicity and who partook most of 
the character of the original race. 
Now owing to changed political conditions the 
Irish have a chance to express themeselves once 
more unhampered by untoward political conditions 
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