Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 2.djvu/396

 by which our race has always fallen, and the virtues by which it has often risen again. When Goethe, during the French Revolution, shut his ears to clamorous current politics, and wrote books that would live, he set a grand example, which humble people in their humble way may properly imitate. Every one has a good word to say for Young Ireland just now, but the high principles of action which Davis preached are not only not Practised, but apparently not remembered. All is as barren from Dan to Isaac, as from Dan to Beersheba! If we should meet Thomas Davis in other planets, and he demands what we have done with his legions of enthusiastic young Irishmen, we must tell him that they are divided between two leaders, one of whom has all O'Connell's shortcomings without the great qualities that counterbalanced them, and the other is a tame Wolfe Tone, with the daring and brains left out. I will probably call the book "Young Ireland." I am weary of new countries, and long for the green pastures where we wandered of old. I often murmur the soliloquy of Sam Ferguson's "Exile"—

As I intended to include in "Young Ireland" a bird's-eye view of Irish History, I was anxious to ascertain what had become of the Irishmen whom Cromwell sold into slavery in the sugar plantations, and whether their descendants were still discernible among the population. I asked Pope Hennessy, then Governor at Hong Kong, but who had formerly been in the West Indies, to obtain this information for me. This was his reply:—

Hennessy's period in Hong Kong was coming to an end, and he told me he had some correspondence with the Colonial Office on getting transferred to one of the great self-governing colonies. My advice was contra:—

Stick (I wrote) to the legislature where you are Speaker, Treasurer, and Premier, like three single gentlemen rolled into one. Trust me you are happier there than you would be in a Constitutional Colony, where your active intellect would have no employment, and where you would be advised by men who, it may be, knew less of the matter in hand than you did. In Australia hospitalities are so constant and so costly that a larger salary is really a smaller income than the moderate pay in a Crown