Europe lost more than her historians have yet realised from the weakness of purpose that let Ireland go down transfixed by the sword of Elizabeth.
Had the fate of Europe been then controlled by a Hohenzollern, instead of by a Spanish Hapsburg, how different might have been the future of the world! Although Europe had forgotten Ireland, Ireland had never forgotten Europe.

Natural outpost and sentinel of that continent in the West for three-hundred years now gagged and bound, since the flight to Rome of her last native Princes, she stands to-day as in the days of Philip III, if an outcast from European civilization non the less rejecting the insular tradition of England, as she has rejected her insular Church.

And now once more in her career she turns to the greatest of European Sovereigns, to win his eyes to the oldest, and certainly the most faithful of European peoples.

Ireland already has given and owes much to Germany.
In the dark ages intercourse between the Celtic people of the West and the Rhinelands and Bavaria was close and long sustained.
Irish monasteries flourished in the heart of Germany, and German architecture gave its note possibly to some of the fairest cathedral churches in Ireland.
Clonfert and Cashel are, perhaps amongst the most conspicuous examples of the influence of that old-time intercourse with Germany.

To-day, when little of her past remains to venerate, her ancient language on what seemed its bed of death owes much of its present day revival to German scholarship and culture.