What writers ought to aim at, who hope to benefit the people, is to fill up the blanks which an imperfect education, and the fever of a tempestuous time, have left in their knowledge, so that their lives might become contented and fruitful. Let me take an instance--I have sometimes marvelled that no one has made it his special task to teach the "tenants at will," who have become proprietors under the Land Purchase Act, what wonders they may accomplish for themselves and the country. To become prosperous and independent by systematic industry is not the greatest of their opportunities; by liberal education and healthy spiritualised lives, spent on the paternal estate, they may make their sons and daughters types of whatever is best in the Celtic character. But they have much to learn and few to teach them. In the United States there is a public department whose business is to furnish settlers on the public lands with the latest information on agricultural science, and with a supply of suitable seeds for new experiments. In the Colonies they are helped also, though less effectually I think. In Ireland scarcely any one has given them so much as good advice or good wishes. I hope some one will write in the new Irish Library a book for this class, describing the _petites cultures_, and the localised industries of the Continent and the honest outdoor enjoyments which help to make life happy. Why may these men not realise the dream of the poet of what Irish farmers, free from feudal bonds, might become?
"The Happy Land, Studded with cheerful homesteads fair to see, With garden grace and household symmetry; How grand the wide-brow'd peasant's lordly mien The matron's smile serene! O happy, happy land!"
I have refrained from specifying books which might be written, and books which ought to be republished, because a design is fatally discounted by promising too much at the outset. It is perhaps enough to say that they must be issued at a price which the people can afford to pay, or they will not buy them; and they must interest them, or they will not read them, though they got them for nothing. Although it is an essential basis of the enterprise to publish books useful to the people, that is not enough. If you would drive out the impure and atheistical but sensational literature borrowed from the French, you must replace it by stimulating stories of our own land: and it will not be safe to neglect poetry, for as a recent poet sings--