applaud only the rigid truth, are
the practices which make nations honoured and happy.

What writers ought to aim at, who hope to benefit the people, is to fill
up the blanks which an imperfect education, and the fever of a tempestuous
time, have left in their knowledge, so that their lives might become
contented and fruitful. Let me take an instance--I have sometimes
marvelled that no one has made it his special task to teach the "tenants
at will," who have become proprietors under the Land Purchase Act, what
wonders they may accomplish for themselves and the country. To become
prosperous and independent by systematic industry is not the greatest of
their opportunities; by liberal education and healthy spiritualised lives,
spent on the paternal estate, they may make their sons and daughters types
of whatever is best in the Celtic character. But they have much to learn
and few to teach 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 mu