country of two races who remain life-long strangers to each other. Catholic and Protestant present to each other a familiar front, but behind the surface of each is a dark background which in later life, when associations, and often prejudices, have been formed, the other can rarely penetrate and rarely wishes to do so. It was Davis's belief that if the young people of Ireland were to be permanently segregated from childhood to manhood in different schools, different universities, where early friendships, the most intimate and familiar of any, could never be made, and ideas never interchanged except through public controversy, the barrier between the two Irish races would be infinitely difficult to break down, and no scheme of Irish government could be conceived which would not seem like a triumph to one of them and bondage to the other. The views of the Young Irelanders did not prevail, and Ireland as a nation has paid the penalty for two generations, and will probably pay it for many a day to come. It may, of course, be argued that religious interests are paramount, and that these are incompatible with a scheme of mixed education. This is not the place to debate such a question, nor can anyone quarrel with a decision arrived at on such grounds. But let it be arrived at with a clear understanding of the certain consequences, and let it be admitted that when Davis saw the wreck of the scheme for united education he felt truly that a long and perhaps, for many generations, irretrievable step was being taken away from the road to nationhood. 

 But after this despondent reflection, let us cheer ourselves by setting the proud and moving words with which Duffy concludes his account of the transactions in the Life of Davis:— 

 "I have not tacked to any transaction in this narrative the moral which it suggests; the thoughtful reader prefers to draw his own conclusions. But for once I ask those to whom this book is dedicated to note the conduct of Catholic young men in a mortal contest. The hereditary leader of the people, sure to be backed by the whole force of the unreflecting masses, and supported on this occasion by the bulk of the national clergy—a man of genius, an historic man wielding an authority made august by a life's services, a solemn moral authority with which it is ridiculous to compare the purely political influence of anyone who has succeeded him as a tribune of the people—was against Thomas Davis, and able, no one doubted, to overwhelm him and his sympathisers in political ruin. A public career might be closed for all of us; our journal might be extinguished; we were already denounced as intriguers and infidels; it was quite certain that, 

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