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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