THE FUTURE OF THE YOUNG MEN OF IRELAND

From Irish Ideas by William O'Brien, 1893

Page 163

THE FUTURE OF THE YOUNG MEN OF IRELAND

« previous page | book contents | start of this chapter | next page »

dreamt of by their fathers already won, and the indisputable power in their own hands of winning the remainder. If their opportunities are great, still greater are their responsibilities; for while it is in their power by persistency, energy, and magnanimity to make the future life of Ireland bright with reasonable material happiness and national self-respect, it is no less certain that upon the capacity they develop for earnest work, large-minded toleration, and superiority to all the temptations of petulance or hot-headedness it will depend whether they will bequeath to their children in the coming years a country sick with discord and failure, or a country in which Irishmen will be proud to live and die.

Disraeli's famous apophthegm, 'The history of heroes is the history of youth,' did something to create an extravagant worship of mere adolescence which history does not justify. All the world has heard of Condé, who won the battle of Rocroi at twenty-two; but if there be heroes to whom humanity is under a deeper obligation than to the heroes of the battle-charge, youth will surely colour with that modesty which is, after all, its sweetest charm, at the recollection that most of the poets, statesmen, scientists, and divines of our own memory—the Mannings and Newmans, the Tennysons and Brownings and Longfellows, the Carlyles and the Owens and the Darwins—were men whose hair was powdered with the snows of three-quarters of a century, and that at this moment the four-score years of the patriarch have long since been outrun by the two men whose shoulders bear the weight of the two mightiest material and spiritual empires of the world—Mr. Gladstone and Pope Leo XIII. All the same, it is the bright battalions of youth that make a nation's glory or its shame; it is their faith that dreams, … continue reading »

« previous page | book contents | start of this chapter | next page »