Irish". Criticism Formed in the wake of the disgrace and fall of the nationalist leader Charles Stewart Parnell and defeat of the second Home Rule Bill, the League drew upon a generation frustrated and disillusioned with electoral politics. But proponents of new and rival movements were sceptical of the cultural activism offered by the League. Writing in Alice Milligan's Belfast monthly, labour and socialist leader James Connolly maintained that in the absence of a creed capable of challenging the rule of the capitalist, landlord and financier, the nationalism of the Irish language movement would achieve little. His friend and collaborator Frederick Ryan, secretary of the Irish National Theatre Society, acknowledged the "pathos" in that in "young men and women rushing to acquire the rudiments of Irish (and it seldom gets beyond that) in order to show that they are not as other nations", but suggested that it did not "correlate with the active desire for political freedom". Most leaders of the Gaelic League desired "a return to medievalism in thought, in literature, in pastimes, in music and even in dress", but a nation, he argued, is not morally raised by dwelling on its past. Rather it must deal with its present political, economic, and social problems, something of which Ireland is capable without assuming "the enormous burden of adopting what is now virtually a new language". Patrick Pearse, who had joined the League while in his teens, responded in An Claidheamh Soluis by defending a "critical traditionalism". The cultural self-belief promoted by the League does not call for "folk attitudes of mind" or "folk conventions of form". Irish artists might have to "imbibe their Irishness from the peasant, since the peasants alone possess Irishism, but they need not and must not [...] be afraid of modern culture". Deriving "what is best in medieval Irish literature", the new Irish prose would be characterised by a "terseness", "crispness", and "plain straightforwardness" entirely conducive to the demands of the modern nation-state and economy. In the Irish Free State With the foundation of the Irish Free State many members believed that the Gaelic League had taken language revival as far as it could and that the task now fell to the new Irish Government. They ceased their League activities and were absorbed into the new political parties and into state bodies such as the Army, Police, Civil Service, and into the school system in