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was unknown-when men and women were fine, healthy, Godfearing beings, living on wholesome food, and not on your deleterious Oriental drugs of tea and coffee-when disease was practically unknown-when science had not invented stethoscopes and electric batteries--when there was no neurosis, or neurasthenia, and no man knew he had a liver-when we were clothed in good old Irish frieze, not in Manchester shoddy-when there were no newspapers, but you could talk for six months about a wedding or a christening; when, in a word, the world of each man was a small world, and we were more interested about our neighbours than about naked savages in Matabele, or what is to be done with the "sick man in Constantinople. Don't you know him-the scientific pessimist?

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And the educational optimist—with his piles of statistics about the Intermediate Examinations-5,340 boys and girls passing in Botany, Mineralogy, Metallurgy, Trigonometry, Physiology, Differential and Integral Calculus, Latin, Greek, Italian, German, French, Gaelic, etc. Ah! my dear sir, what advantages young people have now that we never enjoyed! And what a glorious future lies before our country, when these young people grow to manhood and womanhood, and form the commercial and professional classes-the backbone of the country! Educate ! educate! educate! Take your stand amongst the nations of the earth, and sweep away the curse of illiteracy. We are doing it. In Primary, Intermediate, and very soon in University Education, we will come into line with the best intellects of England, Germany, and America; and then the rest is easy. Ireland's future is assured!

But here suddenly as the stream of optimistic eloquence flows on, a big block is flung across it by the no less fervid, but denunciatory eloquence of the pessimist :

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Education there's no such thing in Ireland! There are not ten educated men in Ireland from Malin Head to Cape Clear. Your systems of education are a mockery, a delusion, and a snare. You cram for examinations, as turkeys are crammed for Christmas: and your boys and girls are consequently suffering from intellectual plethora and indigestion, resulting in mental atrophy and paralysis. Take any of your gold medallists or exhibitioners three months after examination; and he cannot translate a line or sentence in the very books in which he passed with glowing colours. And if

he goes up for a bank examination, or some minor office in the Civil Service, he cannot pass in the elements of grammar, or the rudiments of geography or Arithmetic. He will talk of Homer, and believe that Troy was in North America; he will tell you that Mount Parnassus was in Ireland, and that the Nile flows into St. George's Channel; that Cæsar was killed at Clontarf, and that the battle of the Pyramids was won by Brian Boru. In other words he is a conceited ignoramus, despising everyone, and despised by all. And it only stands to reason. You cannot cram a boy's head with all this learning to any advantage. Meat for men, milk for babes. But you want the babes to fatten on roast beef. You don't know that overfeeding, as any doctor will tell you, is but another word for starvation. God be with the good old times, when the hedgeschoolmasters were as plentiful as blackberries in Ireland, when the scholars took their sods of turf under their arms for school seats; but every boy knew his Virgil and Horace and Homer as well as the last ballad about some rebel that was hanged, and every farmer's son could survey his father's land by merely looking at it-when the Kerry peasants talked to each other in Latin; and when they came up to the Palatines in Limerick, as harvestmen in the autumn, they could make uncomplimentary remarks, and say cuss-words ad libitum before their master's face, and he couldn't understand them, for they spoke the tongue of Cicero and Livy— the language of the educated world. These were the times when Irishmen knew well what they did know, when every Irishman knew three languages perfectly, Voster from cover to cover, the six books of Euclid, the science of mensuration-how to season a hurley for the Sunday game, and how to polish the pike-head for "the muster in the valley, beside the singing river, at the rising of the moon." But we are degenerates. And what's the purpose of it all? Look at the way you educate your children in the National Schools. Listen! Here is a logical proposition. Any system of education is a dismal failure that does not supply the means towards the end. Now, the end of education is to fit pupils for the spheres they shall occupy in life. But the spheres that most pupils occupy in life are spheres either of menial, or manual labour. Therefore, the education of your children should be a literary education, by accident, but a technical education by necessity. Yet, we adopt the opposite course. There is no such thing as technical education in Ireland; and the literary education VOL. XXV. No. 283

is far beyond the necessities, mental or social, of nine tenths of the children who attend our primary schools. What, for example, does a poor girl, who has to earn her bread as housemaid, want to know about freehand drawing, or perspective? and what does a factory hand want to know about the intricacies of the Tonic SolFa System, the science of Transposition, the Modulator, or thehumming song? And what's the result? Our country overwhelmed with professional men, clerks, secretaries, teachers, etc., and the further result, a complete dearth of business men and skilled artisans; and the further result of the decadence of Cork and Dublin, and all purely Irish cities; and the advance, by leaps and bounds, of a half-Scotch, half-American city, like Belfast!

There is your educational pessimist. Who does not know the political pessimist?

"The country gone to the dogs-Ireland once more on the dissecting table-the spirit of faction dominant-the world laughing at us—the country flung back fifty years, etc., etc." It's all well, if he does not quote poetry, and tell us :—

Thy treasure with taunts shall be taken,

Thy valour with jibes be repaid,

And of millions who see thee, now sad and forsaken,

Not one shall step forth to thy aid.

Thou art doomed for thy tyrant to toil,

Thou art doomed for the proud to disdain,

And the blood of thy sons, and the wealth of thy soil

Shall be lavished, and lavished in vain.

Thou art chained to the wheel of the foe

By links that the world cannot sever,

With thy tyrant through sunshine and storm shalt thou go,
And thy sentence is "Banished for ever."

Who does not know him, particularly in these latter days when hardly a rift appears in an ever ominous and darkening sky?

But, is there not a political optimist, who tells you to cheer up? The darkest hour is just before the dawn. We don't want mechanical unity. Better Ireland free, than Ireland united. Ca ira! all will come right. Wait till you see the scattered battalions reforming on the floor of the House of Commons, and the reveillé of the new campaign sounded, and the fighting men putting on their armour, and all opposing forces marshalled together for the fiercest, bravest, angriest Session, yet recorded in the annals of the British Parliament. Ay de mi! says the pessimist.

I have now drawn portraits of these two classes, into which,

And now comes

in the aggregate, humanity may be divided. the important, and by no means easy question-which class best promotes the interests of humanity? Naturally, one's sympathies go out, at once, to the optimists who sing, like Pippa :

God's in His Heaven,

All's right with the world.

We feel a powerful attraction towards these bright sunny souls, who hold their heads aloft, with an eternal sursum corda!" on their lips. We feel a no less powerful repulsion against these sallow, cadaverous, dyspeptic, despondent cynics, who are for ever railing against the world, and clamouring for the better things in which they have no hope. But when we come down to reasoning, perhaps the case differs. For, after all, shorn of his benevolence, what is your optimist, but the easy, self-satisfied lover of good things, who hates to have his rest disturbed, and who has ever on his lips the watchwords of reaction and retrogression: "Can't you let well alone?" "Aren't we just as well where we are?" "What was good enough for our fathers, is it not quite good enough for us?" etc., etc. And is there not something inspiring ever in the despairful, yet lofty dissatisfaction which protests: Certainly not! Everything is not right, in your stagnancy and self-possession. You must rise up, and onwards. En avant! Everything is wrong, and we shall try to right it, though we should fail. Better failure a thousand times than to see, without protest, the lies that are daily before us, on men's lips, and in their lives. Better one sharp struggle, though it end in failure, than the ignoble fate of those who stand up with folded arms, and witness the eternal tragedy that is going on around them."

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"Troublesome fellows, dangerous fellows, revolutionaries," the optimist," these fellows will upset all decent society, ruin our digestions, bring down our stocks and shares, and scatter to the winds all our dreams of present and possible happiness."

"No matter," says the pessimist, "anything is better than to live a lie. Come, you sleek hypocrite, and look at the world. Here, in the midst of your civilisation, human beings are rotting in misery and hunger, whilst their souls are in the grasp of the Evil One. Can you sit down to your comfortable dinner and know that thousands of your fellow beings are starving? In want and ignorance, in sin and sorrow, half mankind live out their weary

lives, and you say this is the best possible world for them and you-" "Yes! but you say you cannot correct it ?" says the optimist. "Where's the use in beating the air ?"

Where indeed ? And so the eternal discussion goes on: the one side maintaining that it is best to let well alone, and enjoy life as best you can—the other, that the progress of the race is due to the sublime dissatisfaction, the eternal restlessness, issuing in healthy or unhealthy revolution. For "out of the black smoke cometh flame," say they; and out of the brooding thunder-cloud the lightning that breaks the burden of the storm; and from the hot hearts of angry men the thoughts that shape themselves into burning words. And from the words come deeds, fraught with the germs of all the great things, and all the noble things, and all the inspirement, that drew man from the beast, and pushed him ever higher and higher, until now he can see in the future that looms before him-"

"What?" says the optimist.

And he must acknowledge with bent head and faltering tonguethat all his visions and dreams, all the vivid splendours of his hopes and fancy, are blotted out, like a shower of fireworks on a black, frowning sky, on which is written in lurid lights one word, Despair!

Meanwhile Pippa, tired out, lies down to rest.

God bless me! I can pray no more to-night.
No doubt, some way or other, hymns say right.

All service ranks the same with God

With God, whose puppets, best or worst,
Are we; there is no last, nor first.

P. A. SHEEhan.

NOTES ON NEW BOOKS.

1. "Crede Mihi." The most ancient Register-book of the Archbishops of Dublin before the Reformation. Now for the first time printed from the original Manuscripts. By John T. Gilbert, LL.D., F.S.A., M.R.I.A. (Dublin: printed for the Editor by Joseph Dollard, Wellington Quay, 1897.)

This fine quarto is the latest achievement of Dr. Gilbert's marvellous industry and skill in deciphering and editing the ancient manuscripts that concern the history of Ireland. A masterly introduction explains the history and nature of the manuscript itself; and the table of contents gives a clear idea of the subject and purport of each of the 160 papal letters and other documents which form the

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