fertilising and fruitful are good books.

Our books may not achieve any of these marvels, but there are results not beyond their reach. England holds the sympathies of all the communities which share her blood, less by obeying the same laws than by loving the same books. And if we do not fail in our task the volumes of the Irish Library will be read by the Irish settler in Canada, the Irish digger in California and Australia, our missionaries and soldiers in India, the adventurous pioneer in Africa, the exile far away in Florida, in Michigan, in Egypt, or in Siam, with more love and enthusiasm than even in the homesteads of Leinster and Munster.

BOOKS FOR THE IRISH PEOPLE.

It is nearly a year since I opened to this Society the design of inducing young Irishmen of the present generation to take up anew a task which famine and political disaster interrupted among their predecessors—the task of teaching the Irish people to understand their own country. The Irish people have never ceased to love their country, they have never shrunk from any labour or sacrifice to serve her, but they do not understand Ireland as the Swiss understand Switzerland; as the Flemings understand the sandbank which their industry has turned into a model farm; or as the Venetians understand the primitive quagmire which Italian genius transformed into one of the wonders of the world.

A year may seem a long time to have employed in preliminary arrangements; but it was not wasted. There were many difficulties to overcome and they have been overcome. We are now in a position to announce that our first volume is printed, and ready to be issued, that the second volume is in the printer’s hands, and successive volumes for more than a year are in preparation. I may mention that the original design of acting through a Limited Liability Company was abandoned in favour of a better plan; a successful and experienced publisher, Mr. Fisher Unwin, takes the responsibility of producing the books, leaving the men of letters to the task for which they are fitter, that of devising and writing them.

The new Irish Library will be offered to all who desire to welcome it, in New York and Melbourne and the continents to which they belong, as well as in Dublin and London; and we hope by an organised system of colportage to carry the books to many districts where there are no regular booksellers at present, or no market for Irish books.

When I say we do not understand Ireland, I do not mean merely that we are imperfectly acquainted with its history, its literature, its art, and its memorable men; but which of us studies Irish statistics till he understands them as he does a current account with a tradesman or a banker? Which of us studies the topography, the political and commercial geography, the botany, the geology, the resources and deficiencies of the country so as to qualify him to handle its interests, in a parish or a parliament, if that task should present itself?

The prosperous wiseacre whom the Germans call a Philistine, and the French an épicier, will tell you that study does not pay. But that respectable citizen may be assured that whatever he values most in his narrow life, whatever adds to its comfort and convenience, whatever simplifies and facilitates his beloved trade (of which steam and electricity are the nerves and sinews) is nothing else than the remote result of some student’s midnight toil. The garments he wears, the furniture of his trim home, not less than the laws which protect his life and the customs which render it easy and pleasant, even the ideas grown commonplace by time which he daily thinks he is thinking, were discovered, invented, or brought from regions more civilised, by men whose toil he undervalues; and if all he owes to study and the intellectual enterprise it begets were snatched away, his home would be almost as naked as the Redman’s wigwam. But if the man of business be moreover a man of meditation and culture, he and his class are among the most indispensable forces of a nation, for it is such men who turn the student’s airy speculation into accomplished fact.

Of all studies that one which a nation can least safely dispense with is a study of its own history. Some one has invented the audacious axiom that history never repeats itself, but it would be truer to affirm that history is always repeating itself; assuredly in our own history identical weaknesses and identical virtues recur from generation to generation, and to know them may teach us where weak places in national and individual character need to be fortified and strong ones developed.

Of politics, if it were only the politics of a parish, what can we know worth knowing unless the lamp of history lights the misty way? And the great problem of all—for what special career do the gifts and deficiencies of our race, their position on the globe, their past and their present career best fit them?—only a familiarity with their annals will enable any one to say.

Another use of historical study is to enable us to vindicate our race from unjust aspersions. This is no sentimental gain, but one eminently practical; Ireland and Irishmen suffer wrong from systematic misrepresentation, which only better knowledge will cure. Which of us has not heard mimics of Macaulay disparaging the Irish Parliament of James II. as a disgrace to civilisation, or Mr. Froude’s gloomy devotees lift their hands in horror at the Rising of 1641? We purpose to face these calumnies. In the first volume of our series, Thomas Davis, reprinting the principal Acts of James’ Parliament, criticises them in careful detail, and finds them for the most part just, moderate, and generous. Whoever takes up the story of 1641, in the same judicial spirit cannot fail to pronounce that though in the end barbarities were committed on both sides of that struggle, according to the evil habit of the age throughout Europe, the original design of the old inhabitants to repossess themselves of lands taken from them by fraud and violence a generation earlier, was a design which the twelve apostles might have sanctioned. I read quite recently, with a good deal of surprise, a new reproach to Irishmen, derived from the history of the last century. It was not Celts, we are told, but Normans and Saxons, who served the Empire with distinction a century ago in peace and war. Marvellous fact, indeed, that the Catholic Celt did not distinguish himself as a statesman or a general when he was peremptorily shut out by law from the Senate and the Council of War, and that he did not make scientific and practical discoveries when he was deliberately denied education. But history will teach us that wherever there was an open door, as on the Continent and in the New World beyond the Atlantic, and in later times in all the Colonies of the Empire, the Celt has done notable work, and never in a solitary instance been unfaithful to the trust so tardily and so reluctantly confided to him. These mordant critics would exalt the men of English descent by disparaging the men of Celtic breed, but in vain. We regard all Irishmen who love their country, whatever be their creed or pedigree, as equally our countrymen. We rejoice in the splendid record of success in arms, arts, literature, and diplomacy which the Irish minority can exhibit; we acknowledge thankfully that wherever the rank of native patriots became thin or broken, men of the other race leaped into their perilous places; and we cannot look on