ature of the people, and correct it where
correction is needful. Education is far stronger than nature, and there is
no doubt the deficiencies in national character may be repaired by
discipline. The highest teaching of a people is to accustom them to have a
strict regard for the rights of others, to be prudent and temperate in
action, and to regard the whole nation as members of a common household.
To make our people politically free, yet leave them bond-slaves of some
debasing social system like that which crowds the mines and factories of
England with squalid victims, or make the artisans of France so often
godless scoffers, would be a poor result of all Ireland's labours and
sacrifices.

Liberty will do much for a nation, but it will not do everything. Among a
people who do not know and reverence their own ancestors, who do not
submit cheerfully to lawful authority, and do not love the eternal
principles of justice, it will do little. But moral sentiments, generous
impulses, religious feelings still survive in the Irish race, and they
give assurance that in that mystic clime on the verge of the Western
Ocean, where the more debasing currents of European civilisation only
reach it at high tide, there is place for a great experiment for humanity.
There within our circling seas we may rear a race in which the fine
qualities of the Celtic family, fortified by the sterner strength of the
North, and disciplined by the Norman genius of Munster may at last have
fair play; where, at lowest a pious and gallant race may after long
struggles and nameless sufferings possess their own soil and their own
souls in peace.

Let me say, though I have said it more than once before, that the Celts
are among the most teachable of races. The drill, the jacket, the
discipline, transform an Irish peasant into a sub-constable with almost as
military a carriage, and as expert an eye and hand as a veteran of the
Peninsula. A few years in a National School, and the boy who emerged from
a smoky and squalid cabin, shared with a pig, is turned into a clean and
shapely youth, fit to wrestle with the world, and perhaps to win the
match. Look at a railway porter, or a railway policeman--the decent
uniform and the punctual system soon make a new man of the peasant. An
English priest in Paris, with little prejudice in favour of our race,
assured me that no girls crossed the sea who acquire so speedily the
carriage, deportment, and grace which distingu