Another use of historical study is to enable us to vindicate our race from unjust aspersions. This is no sentimental gain, but one eminently practical; Ireland and Irishmen suffer wrong from systematic misrepresentation, which only better knowledge will cure. Which of us has not heard mimics of Macaulay disparaging the Irish Parliament of James II. as a disgrace to civilisation, or Mr. Froude's gloomy devotees lift their hands in horror at the Rising of 1641? We purpose to face these calumnies. In the first volume of our series, Thomas Davis, reprinting the principal Acts of James' Parliament, criticises them in careful detail, and finds them for the most part just, moderate, and generous. Whoever takes up the story of 1641, in the same judicial spirit cannot fail to pronounce that though in the end barbarities were committed on both sides of that struggle, according to the evil habit of the age throughout Europe, the original design of the old inhabitants to repossess themselves of lands taken from them by fraud and violence a generation earlier, was a design which the twelve apostles might have sanctioned. I read quite recently, with a good deal of surprise, a new reproach to Irishmen, derived from the history of the last century. It was not Celts, we are told, but Normans and Saxons, who served the Empire with distinction a century ago in peace and war. Marvellous fact, indeed, that the Catholic Celt did not distinguish himself as a statesman or a general when he was peremptorily shut out by law from the Senate and the Council of War, and that he did not make scientific and practical discoveries when he was deliberately denied education. But history will teach us that wherever there was an open door, as on the Continent and in the New World beyond the Atlantic, and in later times in all the Colonies of the Empire, the Celt has done notable work, and never in a solitary instance been unfaithful to the trust so tardily and so reluctantly confided to him. These mordant critics would exalt the men of English descent by disparaging the men of Celtic breed, but in vain. We regard all Irishmen who love their country, whatever be their creed or pedigree, as equally our countrymen. We rejoice in the splendid record of success in arms, arts, literature, and diplomacy which the Irish minority can exhibit; we acknowledge thankfully that wherever the rank of native patriots became thin or broken, men of the other race leaped into their perilous places; and we cannot look on the noble edifices which adorn the Irish capital, two of them not excelled by the Palace of Legislation or the Palace of Commerce in any capital of Europe, without thankfully remembering how much our country owes to the cultivated genius of the minority. If the races who inhabit these islands are ever to understand and honour each other, it must be on condition of comprehending the past, not hiding it away; and history is the reservoir from which such knowledge is drawn.