by-and-by, we would be described as hirelings of the Castle. But Davis was right; and of all his associates, not one man flinched from his side—not one man. A crisis bringing character to a sharper test has never arisen in our history, nor can ever arise; and the conduct of these men, it seems to me, is some guarantee how their successors would act in any similar emergency." 

 The year 1845 was loaded with disaster for Ireland. It saw the defeat of the Education scheme; it saw the advancing shadow of the awful calamity in which the Repeal movement, the Young Irelanders, and everything of hope and promise that lived and moved in Ireland were to perish—and it saw the death of Thomas Davis. 

 He had had an attack of scarlet fever, from which he seemed to be recovering, but a relapse took place—owing, perhaps, to incautious exposure before his strength had returned—and, in the early dawn of September 15th, he passed away in his mother's house. The years of his life were thirty-one; his public life had lasted but for three. His funeral was marked by an extraordinary outburst of grief and affection, which was shared by men of all creeds, all classes, all political camps in Ireland. 

 No mourning, indeed, could be too deep for the withdrawal at such a moment of such a leader from the task to which he had consecrated his life. That task was far more than the winning of political independence for his country. Davis united in himself, in a degree which has never been known before or since, the spirit of two great originators in Irish history—the spirit of Swift and the spirit of Berkeley—of Swift, the champion of his country against foreign oppression; of Berkeley, who bade her turn her thoughts inward, who summoned her to cultivate the faculties and use the liberties she already possessed for the development of her resources and the strengthening of her national character. Davis's best and most original work was educative rather than aggressive. He often wrote, as Duffy says, "in a tone of strict and haughty discipline designed to make the people fit to use and fit to enjoy liberty." No one recognised more fully than he the regenerative value of political forms, but his ideal was never that of a millennium to be won by Act of Parliament—he was ever on the watch for some opportunity to remind his countrymen of the indispensable need of self-discipline and self-reliance, of toil, of veracity, of justice and fairness towards opponents. No one ever said sharper and sterner things to the Irish people—witness his articles on "Scolding Mobs," on "Moral Force," and on the attack upon one of the jurors who had convicted O'Connell 

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