them. In the United States there is a public department whose business is to furnish settlers on the public lands with the latest information on agricultural science, and with a supply of suitable seeds for new experiments. In the Colonies they are helped also, though less effectually I think. In Ireland scarcely any one has given them so much as good advice or good wishes. I hope some one will write in the new Irish Library a book for this class, describing the petites cultures, and the localised industries of the Continent and the honest outdoor enjoyments which help to make life happy. Why may these men not realise the dream of the poet of what Irish farmers, free from feudal bonds, might become?

“The Happy Land,
Studded with cheerful homesteads fair to see,
With garden grace and household symmetry;
How grand the wide-brow’d peasant’s lordly mien
The matron’s smile serene!
O happy, happy land!”

I have refrained from specifying books which might be written, and books which ought to be republished, because a design is fatally discounted by promising too much at the outset. It is perhaps enough to say that they must be issued at a price which the people can afford to pay, or they will not buy them; and they must interest them, or they will not read them, though they got them for nothing. Although it is an essential basis of the enterprise to publish books useful to the people, that is not enough. If you would drive out the impure and atheistical but sensational literature borrowed from the French, you must replace it by stimulating stories of our own land: and it will not be safe to neglect poetry, for as a recent poet sings—

“Dear to the Gael’s the clash of swords,
And dear the ring of rhyme.”

The editors will not print anything which they do not believe useful and beneficial, but they must not be held responsible for every sentence and sentiment in books originated, or reprinted, under their direction. A too rigid strictness might involve an amount of alteration, which would be fair neither to the author nor the reader, and would be fatal to the generous and liberal freedom in which alone literature thrives. I will only add that if the Irish people second our design cordially, the stream which will now begin to flow shall not soon run dry. But remember that success depends mainly on you and your compeers. What is the use of writing books if they are not read and pondered on, and their lessons taken to heart? Without a sympathetic audience the orator is only a lay figure, without a sympathetic circle of readers the writer is a wasted force. We labour for the young men and young women of Ireland, on whom the future of our race depends; and our hope is that they may respond as cordially as their predecessors did fifty years ago; that they may aim to gain a complete knowledge of their own country, and come forth from the study steeped in Irish memories, proud of Irish traditions, panting with Irish hopes. Every Irishman, anywhere in the world, who wishes well to our design, can help it a little; but there is one class whose good wishes are indispensable. Father Hogan, a professor of Maynooth College, has appealed to his brethren in the ministry, in language which I prefer to any I could employ on the subject:—