es 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