object
of which is to stir up and encourage amongst the young men of Ireland
a wholesome desire for what is good, and a salutary contempt for what
is either silly or debased."

There is another class whose help we cannot spare--Irish journalists in
Ireland, England, America, and Australia. They can make our undertaking
known to all who read, and can drop the same thought, as de Tocqueville
says, into a thousand minds at the same moment. They have helped us
hitherto, and they will help us for the future, I make no doubt, as far as
we deserve help, and we are entitled to expect no more.

It will be a pleasant task hereafter, I trust, to remember some of the
dismal predictions which our enterprise had to encounter at the outset.
The black prophets, who believe in no good till it is accomplished, warned
us that we labour in vain, that our population is yearly decreasing, and
is destined to merge in an imperial race, whose voice may be heard
uttering the word of command in the five great divisions of the world, and
that the men who remain are broken by quarrels as old as tradition, and
never likely to end. I would like to conclude with a word on each of these
objections. It is true we are united to a race who dominate huge tracts of
the globe, but I have visited four of the five great divisions in
question, and I can affirm that the word of command is not unfrequently
uttered with an Ulster burr, or an unequivocal Munster brogue. In every
great colony it has been spoken from the _dais_ of authority in the
accents we love. Nay, more, I met officers in the service of France and
Belgium, and some who had served in Austria, indistinguishable from
Frenchmen and Germans in their ordinary conversation, who, when they
strayed into English, became unmistakably Leinster-men or Munster-men, but
none of these Irishmen show the least disposition to merge themselves in
any other race. And the millions of our people in America, are they not
more Irish than the Irish at home? No, there is no danger that we shall
lose our nationality, or weary of labouring for it.

"The toil for Ireland once begun,
We never will give o'er,
Nor own a land on earth but one--
We're Paddies evermore."

It is too true that our population is still diminishing; generations must
perhaps pass before it regains the maximum it had reached fifty years ago;
but let not that disastrous fact discourage us overmuch. It is not by the
number,