But from our national awakening to the significance of the medium so long ignored we have grown so excited that we frequently forget the greater significance of the thing.

The utterance of the man is of first importance, and, where his utterance has weight, the vital need is to secure it through some medium, the medium becoming important when one more than another is found to have a wider and more intimate appeal; and then we do well to become insistent for a particular medium when it is in anxiety for full delivery of the writer's thought and a wide knowledge of its truth.

But we are losing sight of this natural order of things.

It is well, then, the unconvinced Gall should hear why he should accept the Irish language; not simply to defer to the Gael, but to quicken the mind and defend the territory of what is now the common country of the Gael and Gall.

Davis caught up the great significance of the language when he said: "Tis a surer barrier, and more important frontier, than fortress or river." The language is at once our frontier and our first fortress, and behind it all Irishmen should stand, not because a particular branch of our people evolved it, but because it is the common heritage of all.