ing them.

The new Irish Library will be offered to all who desire to welcome it, in
New York and Melbourne and the continents to which they belong, as well as
in Dublin and London; and we hope by an organised system of colportage to
carry the books to many districts where there are no regular booksellers
at present, or no market for Irish books.

When I say we do not understand Ireland, I do not mean merely that we are
imperfectly acquainted with its history, its literature, its art, and its
memorable men; but which of us studies Irish statistics till he
understands them as he does a current account with a tradesman or a
banker? Which of us studies the topography, the political and commercial
geography, the botany, the geology, the resources and deficiencies of the
country so as to qualify him to handle its interests, in a parish or a
parliament, if that task should present itself?

The prosperous wiseacre whom the Germans call a Philistine, and the French
an _epicier_, will tell you that study does not pay. But that respectable
citizen may be assured that whatever he values most in his narrow life,
whatever adds to its comfort and convenience, whatever simplifies and
facilitates his beloved trade (of which steam and electricity are the
nerves and sinews) is nothing else than the remote result of some
student's midnight toil. The garments he wears, the furniture of his trim
home, not less than the laws which protect his life and the customs which
render it easy and pleasant, even the ideas grown commonplace by time
which he daily thinks he is thinking, were discovered, invented, or
brought from regions more civilised, by men whose toil he undervalues; and
if all he owes to study and the intellectual enterprise it begets were
snatched away, his home would be almost as naked as the Redman's wigwam.
But if the man of business be moreover a man of meditation and culture, he
and his class are among the most indispensable forces of a nation, for it
is such men who turn the student's airy speculation into accomplished
fact.

Of all studies that one which a nation can least safely dispense with is a
study of its own history. Some one has invented the audacious axiom that
history never repeats itself, but it would be truer to affirm that history
is always repeating itself; assuredly in our own history identical
weaknesses and identical virtues recur from generation to generation, and
to know them may teach us where weak plac