ish French women, as girls
from Munster, coming perhaps as servants to some great lady. And this
physical training is a small achievement compared with the result of
discipline on the _intellect_ and _practical power_ of cultivated,
aspiring men. The one multiplies iron, the other multiplies rarest gold of
Ophir. But we have not, I fear, made even a beginning in the practical
education which makes industry prosperous. I lived for a quarter of a
century in Australia, and there rarely came an English ship into the port
of Melbourne that did not bring me letters of introduction with young
Irishmen who hoped to make their home in the new country. Such of them as
it was possible to place in the public service, and that was a limited
number, did their work extremely well. But after I had done all that I
reasonably could do--for I was administering the affairs of a colony where
three-fourths of the inhabitants were English and Scotch, and the
patronage had to be distributed in just relation to the population--an
enormous remnant remained to be provided for. Some of them were as bright,
intelligent young fellows as I ever met in the world, but they were wholly
untrained in any business. They had no profession and no trade; they were
merely nice fellows, and agreeable idle gentlemen. Now what became of them
in the new country, where there was work and pay for everybody who was
willing and able to work, and brought to the public service some capacity
worth paying for? Multitudes of them sank to be waiters in hotels,
barbers, and cabmen. The man who had a trade prospered in a wonderful
manner, the man who had a profession prospered, according to his capacity,
but the man who was ready "to do anything" generally found nothing to do.

It has been asked scornfully what we can hope to effect in a little
country with diminishing population and limited resources? Ought not some
Irish student to teach our people that it is not great states like those
which the greed of conquerors has aggregated, but states scarcely larger
than an Irish province which have done the most memorable work for
humanity and civilisation? The achievements in arts, arms, science, and
discovery, and in the art of government of the Greek Republics, of the
Italian Republics, of the trampled provinces of Spain in the Low
Countries, of the little rib taken out of the side of Spain, and called
Portugal, how emphatically they teach the lesson that it is not by the
quanti