Brag as we like, the reproach was not undeserved, nor is it quite removed.
She is still a serf-nation, but she is struggling wisely and patiently, and is ready to struggle, with all the energy her advisers think politic, for liberty. She has ceased to wail—she is beginning to make up a record of English crime and Irish suffering, in order to explain the past, justify the present, and caution the future. She begins to study the past—not to acquire a beggar's eloquence in petition, but a hero's wrath in strife. She no longer tears and parades her wounds to win her smiter's mercy; and now she should look upon her breast and say:—"That wound makes me distrust, and this makes me guard, and they all will make me steadier to resist, or, if all else fails, fiercer to avenge."
Thus will Ireland do naturally and honourably.
Our spirit has increased—our liberty is not far off.
But to make our spirit lasting and wise as it is bold—to make our liberty an inheritance for our children, and a charter for our prosperity—we must study as well as strive, and learn as well as feel.
If we attempt to govern ourselves without statesmanship—to be a nation without a knowledge of the country's history, and of the propensities to good and ill of the people—or to fight without generalship, we will fail in policy, society, and war. These—all these things—we, people of Ireland, must know if we would be a free, strong nation. A mockery of Irish independence is not what we want. The bauble of a powerless parliament does not lure us. We are not children. The office of supplying England with recruits, artizans, and corn, under the benign interpositions of an Irish Grand Jury, shall not be our destiny. By our deep conviction—by the power of mind over the people, we say, No!
We are true to our colour, "the green," and true to our watchword, "Ireland for the Irish." We want to win Ireland and keep it. If we win it, we will not lose it nor give it away to a bribing, a bullying, or a flattering minister. But, to be able to keep it, and use it, and govern it, the men of Ireland must know what it is, what it was, and what it can be made. They must study her history, perfectly know her present state, physical and moral—and train themselves up by science, poetry, music, industry, skill, and by all the studies and accomplishments of peace and war.
If Ireland were in national health, her history would be familiar by books, pictures, statuary, and music to every cabin and shop in the land—her resources as an agricultural, manufacturing, and trading people would be equally known—and every young man would be trained, and every grown man able to defend her coast, her plains, her towns, and her hills—not with his right arm merely, but by his disciplined habits and military accomplishments. These are the pillars of independence.
Academies of art, institutes of science, colleges of literature, schools and camps of war, are a nation's means for teaching itself strength, and winning safety and honour; and when we are a nation, please God, we shall have them all. Till then we must work for ourselves. So far as we can study music in societies, art in schools, literature in institutes, science in our colleges, or soldiership in theory, we are bound as good citizens to learn. Where these are denied by power, or unattainable by clubbing the resources of neighbours, we must try and study for ourselves. We must visit museums and antiquities, and study, and buy, and assist books of history to know what the country and people were, how they fell, how they suffered, and how they arose again. We must read books of statistics—and let us pause to regret that there is no work on the statistics of Ireland except the scarce lithograph of Moreau, the papers in the second Report of the Railway Commission, and the chapters in M'Culloch's Statistics of the British Empire—the Repeal Association ought to have a handbook first, and then an elaborate and vast account of Ireland's statistics brought out.
To resume, we must read such statistics as we have, and try and get better; and we must get the best maps of the country—the Ordnance and County Index Maps, price 2s. 6d. each, and the Railway Map, price £1—into our Mechanics' Institutes, Temperance Reading-rooms, and schools. We must, in making our journeys of business and pleasure, observe and ask for the nature and amount of the agriculture, commerce, and manufactures of the place we are in, and its shape, population, scenery, antiquities, arts, music, dress, and capabilities for improvement. A large portion of our people travel a great deal within Ireland, and often return with no knowledge, save of the inns they slept in and the traders they dealt with.