to me, is some guarantee how their successors would act in
any similar emergency."

The year 1845 was loaded with disaster for Ireland. It saw the defeat
of the Education scheme; it saw the advancing shadow of the awful
calamity in which the Repeal movement, the Young Irelanders, and
everything of hope and promise that lived and moved in Ireland were to
perish--and it saw the death of Thomas Davis.

He had had an attack of scarlet fever, from which he seemed to be
recovering, but a relapse took place--owing, perhaps, to incautious
exposure before his strength had returned--and, in the early dawn of
September 15th, he passed away in his mother's house. The years of his
life were thirty-one; his public life had lasted but for three. His
funeral was marked by an extraordinary outburst of grief and affection,
which was shared by men of all creeds, all classes, all political camps
in Ireland.

No mourning, indeed, could be too deep for the withdrawal at such a
moment of such a leader from the task to which he had consecrated his
life. That task was far more than the winning of political independence
for his country. Davis united in himself, in a degree which has never
been known before or since, the spirit of two great originators in
Irish history--the spirit of Swift and the spirit of Berkeley--of
Swift, the champion of his country against foreign oppression; of
Berkeley, who bade her turn her thoughts inward, who summoned her to
cultivate the faculties and use the liberties she already possessed for
the development of her resources and the strengthening of her national
character. Davis's best and most original work was educative rather
than aggressive. He often wrote, as Duffy says, "in a tone of strict
and haughty discipline designed to make the people fit to use and fit
to enjoy liberty." No one recognised more fully than he the
regenerative value of political forms, but his ideal was never that of
a millennium to be won by Act of Parliament--he was ever on the watch
for some opportunity to remind his countrymen of the indispensable need
of self-discipline and self-reliance, of toil, of veracity, of justice
and fairness towards opponents. No one ever said sharper and sterner
things to the Irish people--witness his articles on "Scolding Mobs," on
"Moral Force," and on the attack upon one of the jurors who had
convicted O'Connell at the State Trial.[4] But Davis could utter hard
things without wounding, for, when a