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THOMAS DAVIS.

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THOMAS DAVIS. [BY ALIQUIS]. (To the Young Wales Society of Harry T dedicate this sketch.') In a story that I wrote a month or two ago for the South Wales Star, entitled a Daughter of the Geraldines." I tried to interest the readers of the South Wales Star in the sister Celtic Nationality of Ireland by showing them at least one scene in her hour of suffering and agony, when the banner of the triumphant nationalism that Grattan raised in 1782 sank in a sea of treachery and blood. I propose on the present occasion to present a later scene in the history of the most distressful country," but I have now no intention to resort to fiction. The story of Thomas Da. vis is as romantic and pathetic as that of Romeo and Juliet or of the Bride of Lammermoor, and ic has what those stories have not a real and true moral for us who live to-day. and especially ton those of us who live in Wales. To Young Wales their noblest com- patriot who learnt the great lesson that many Welshmen of to-day have yet to learn, the lesson of unselfish devotion to a high ideal, speaks still above the bray of discordant sects and the shrieks of self-interested partisans, and calls on Wales, the land of his fathers, to remember that national- ism" has been advocated too exclusively by narrow appeals to economy, and sought by means which Deither conciliated nor frightened its opponents He bids us take a nobler stand, and tells us if we take it we shall succeed by arraying the deep strong passions of men's hearts in favour of our cause." Thomas Davits was born at Mallow, near Cork, in 1814. His father, in his own words, was "a gentleman of Welsh blood," while his mother, the -daughter of an Anglo-Irish-Xorman family, traced back her line to the great Norman house of Howard—and what Davis loved better to remem- ber, to the great Celtic house of O'Sullivan Beare (Duffy's Life of Davis, p. 3). At an early age Davis went with his family to live at Dublin, but one of his earliest ballads, on the Bride of Mallow. shows that-he never forgot the scenes of his boyhood. The Dublin that he saw as a youth was the Dublin of Burke-yet with a difference. In Burke's youth, as in Davis's, Protestant ascen- dancy reigned supreme but while in Burke's day there was hope and there was patriotism, in Davis's youth all hope seemed to have passed away. Ireland a nation had been tried in the days of Grattan, and the experiment had collapsed, so men said, in revolution and blood. The gentry of Ireland had ceased to be patriots. They had for- gotten the traditions of Swift, of Molyneux, of Lucas, and of Grattan, and had sunk, some into the role of an English garrison force, while the majority were absentee spendthrifts. A Church more fiercely alien than ever to the nation-for the broad and liberal Churchmanship of Grattan had yielded to a narrow and persecuting Evangelicism --drew from the country larger endowments than any other Church in Europe, and ministered to not a twelfth of the nation. Although the Roman Catholics had received the franchise from Grattan's Parliament, they were ineligible for election, and all offices of trust and emolument were in the hands of the Protestant oligarchy; while, as the years rolled on, the peasantry saw their lot become more and more hopeless, as the extortioner, now more than ever an absentee, robbed them of the fruit of generations of toil in the name of rent. and turned them from the lands that they had tilled to starve on the roadside. And yet things were no longer peaceful. The dream of a united Ireland free to work out her own salvation had, it was true, passed away but the famished peasantry were no longer passive serfs. They were organised for rebellion, and in Daniel O'Connel they had found a leader. But the new movement could only raise the gloomiest fears in the patriotic heart. It was true that a bigotry, as fierce, as stern, as narrow, as that of the dominant class was now arrayed against them, but there was little prospect of anything to arise from this war of factions, except an eternity of misery for the unhappy country which they might in turn oppress. And yet. amid this wild scene of strife and turmoil the young Thomas Davis, at school and college, could yet dream dreams of a. brighter and happier future for the distressed land. In youth he cared little for the ordinary sports of the school boy at college he won little distinction in the ordinary academic grooves. And yet, like Edmund Burke, he studied and he dreamt. Of his boyhood's dreams he has said, What thoughts were mine in early youth Like some old Irish song, Brimful of love, and life, and truta, My spirit gushed along. I hoped to right my native isle, I hoped a soldier's fame, I hoped to rest in woman's smile, And win a minstrel's name. And from that day through wildest woe, That hope has shone a far light; Nor could life's brightest summer glow Outshine that solemn starlight. It seemed to watch above my head In forum field and fane; Its angel voice sang round my bed A nation once again While," says his biographer, the young men about him were dreaming, as the goal of life, to win the great seal or episcopal lawn, this silent student had a rarer and more daring ambition. He resolved to be the servant of his country, as the great men of old, who had touched his heart, had been. If he devoured history, and the historical romance and drama which light up the past, and pondered on the codes, annals, and memoirs, the speculations of economists and moralists, who dis- closed the laws which govern human conduct, tt was that he might not be an unprofitable servant." At Trinity, Dublin, he, however, found congenial friends. However aristocratic a University may be in constitution, it must, nevertheless, mirror, better than any other organised body in a country, its higher life and, what is of even greater im- portance, it will show most clearly the ideal to which the nation tends. It was at Aberystwith College that Cymru Fydd was born. Trinity, Dublin, gave birth not only to the Young Ireland movement, but also to the Volunteers of '82, and to the United Irishmen. The spirit of Trinity, Dublin, like that of con- temporary Oxford, was in fierce revolt against the dominant spirit of the age. The age of the forties was an age of materialism. Louis Philippe, in France, was the citizen king. The Liberal policy of England was Man can live by bread alone." The fact was that the old idea of the eighteenth oentury laissez faire in politics (which had for its concomitant, classicism in art) continued to be the policy of the governing classes throughout Europe. True it was that a better and nobler ideal had been given to the world by the philosophy of Burke, and the pictured page of Scott, by the patriotic life of the German statesman Stein, and by the martyrdon of Hoffer, the peasant patriot of the Tyrol. Men had learnt from such writings and such lives the higher ideal of patriotism and duty, but though the governing classes had been all too willing to turn such feelings to their own ends as weapons to strike the soulless despotism of a Napoleon, but in their policy and their minds where their own subjects Were concerned such a consideration had no place. Modern Anglicism" wrote Davies to a friend, i.e. Utilitarianism the creed of Russell and Peel, as well as of the Radicals, this thing call it Yankeeism or Englishism, which measures pros- perity by exchangeable value, measures duty by gain, and limits desires to food, clothes and re- spectability—this thing has come into Ireland Under the Whigs, and is equally the favourite of the Peel Tories. It is believed in the political assemblies in our cities, preached from our pulpits, it is the very Apostles creed of the professions, and threatens to corrupt the lower classes who are still faithful and romantic." Materialism spells seltishness. individualism that preaches all for self, that jeers at everything that the present cannot turn to pounds, shillings, and pence, is the antithesis of nationalism. To Religious men and to patriots the doctrines of the Manchester School were loathsome. Oxford gave its great protest in the Tractarian movement. Trinity, Dublin, gave it in the" Nation." Im- partial German critics see that both the protests against materialism and selfishness came from the same sourcetha-t they were both logically descended from Burke's philosophic vindication of historic National life against the levellers of the day, who thought that the destructive obstructions of French Philosophy would suffer for the politics of all time, a vindication which Sir Walter Scott made Poetry, and which forms the explanation of one of the great movements in the politics of to-day. In academic Oxford the protest took a religious form, and attacked the sham Liberalism of the hour on its religious side. In the academic society °f academic Dublin, where men had only to look t'Oland them to see That never lived a nation yet could rule another well," the. utilitarian philosophy of the English Whigs, ch meant, in plain English, landlord robbery and alien misrule, called into existence a band of students who hated the sham Liberalism of Eng- ird as much as Newman and Pusey abhored Jt* hut who were patriots rather than theologians, "flC|noerat8, rather thap sacerdotaluta. Among these young men there arose the idea of a national'newspaper, which should appeal to the Irish nation in the name of morality and patriotism, which should tell the youth of the country that they had still a country to live for, as had their fathers in the old days—Hugh O'Neill, Sarsfield, and Grattan. How the idea took shape, let Sir Charles Gavan Duffy say :— It was at this time, in the autumn of 1841, that I made Davis's acquaintance at the Repeal Association, and Dillon's (the father of the present Mr. John Dillon) at the Register Office, where I had preceded him in an acquaintance to journalism. I was in town only for a few days, to keep terms at the King's Inn, and had no opportunity of culti- vating their acquaintance before returning to Belfast, where I then edited a bi-weekly newspaper. But they were so unlike all I had previously seen of Irish journalists that I was eager to know more of them. On returning to Dublin in the spring of 1842 I met them in the hall of the four Courts, and they put off their gowns and walked out with me to the Phoenix Park, to have a frank talk about Irish affairs. We soon found that our purpose was the same-to raise up Ireland socially, morally, and politically. and to put the sceptre of self-government into her hands. I proposed that we should establish and conduct a weekly paper as an organ of the opinions we held in common. Seated under a noble elm in the Park, facing Kilmainham ('the Bastille of Ireland '), we debated the project and agreed on the general plan. I was to find funds and under- take the editorship, and we were to recruit con- tributors among our friends. We separated on an agreement to meet again in the summer and launch the journal in the autumn." (lh be continu!'tl.)

IA UNIVERSAL GRIEVANCE.

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