Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 1.djvu/84

 A signal opportunity soon offered for promoting the adult education so much needed. It was proposed to commemorate the services of Father Mathew by a national memorial. The chief nobility, gentry, merchants, and eminent ecclesiastics of both Churches tendered their aid, and the project promised to be a notable success. I suggested that instead of erecting a stone and mortar or marble and bronze monument, the opportunity ought to be seized to complete and consolidate Father Mathew's noble work. If the money were expended in perfecting the Teetotal Societies, they would become the clubs, the adult schools, the lecture-rooms, the parish parliaments of a sober people. As their resources and opportunities expanded they might be encouraged to establish museums, public baths, public walks, bands, exhibition-rooms, benefit societies, and all the other agencies of popular enlightenment and comfort. Among a people so equipped a national literature would spring up—a literature not founded on the gasconade and gormandising of pseudo Irish dragoons or slang stories about the blunders of Paddy and Andy, but genuinely native, recalling all we love or hate in the chequered history of our country, and reviving a thousand memories which made her sons proud to call her mother. Though long servitude had left the mass of the people not only ignorant of the historic past, but ignorant of contemporary events beyond the narrow horizon of their personal experience, there was a generation issuing from college and from the National schools, and gathered into the temperance societies which would constitute a fit audience for lessons of more informed and generous patriotism. My proposal was well received, and seemed not unlikely to be adopted in whole or part. But