Ireland:
"All thy life has been a symbol; we can only read a part:
God will flood thee yet with sunshine for the woes that drench thy heart."
JOHN BOYLE O'REILLY.
We had at first intended that this should be a book without apreface, and indeed it needs none, for it speaks in no uncertain tonesfor itself; but on reconsideration we decided that it would be moreseemly to give a short explanation of our aim, our motives, and ourmethods.
As a result of innumerable inquiries which have come to us duringour experience as educators, we have been forced to the conclusionthat the performances of the Irish race in many fields of endeavor areentirely unknown to most people, and that even to the elect they arenot nearly so well known as they deserve to be. Hence there came to usthe thought of placing on record, in an accessible, comprehensive, andpermanent form, an outline of the whole range of Irish achievementduring the last two thousand years.
In undertaking this task we had a twofold motive. In the firstplace, we wished to give to people of Irish birth or descentsubstantial reason for that pride of race which we know is in them, byplacing in their hands an authoritative and unassailable array offacts as telling as any nation in the world can show. Our secondmotive was that henceforward he who seeks to ignore or belittle thepart taken by men and women of Irish birth or blood in promoting thespread of religion, civilization, education, culture, and freedomshould sin, not in ignorance, but against the light, and that from athousand quarters at once champions armed with the panoply ofknowledge should be able to spring to his confutation.
To carry out in a satisfactory manner over a field so immense ourlawfully ambitious aim was, as we realized at the outset, not possibleto any two men who are primarily engaged, as we are, in other work ofan exacting nature. Therefore, to render feasible the execution of ourundertaking, we decided to invite the collaboration of many scholarsand specialists, each of whom could, out of the fullness ofinformation, speak with authority on some particular phase of thegeneral subject. We are glad to say that the eminent writers to whomwe addressed ourselves answered with promptitude and alacrity to ourcall, and have supplied us with such a body of material as to enableus to bring out a book that is absolutely unique.
From each contributor we asked nothing but a plain verifiablestatement of facts, and that, we think, is exactly what they havegiven us, for, while we do not make ourselves personally responsiblefor everything set down in the following pages, we believe that whatstands written therein bears every mark of careful research and ofabsolute reliability.
Although on many of our subjects little more remains to be saidthan what appears in the text, yet the treatment on the whole does notclaim to be exhaustive, and therefore each writer has, at our request,appended to his contribution a short and carefully selectedbibliography, so that those who are interested may have a guide forfurther reading. For our part, we consider these lists of works ofreference to be a highly useful feature.
It is a glorious thing for us, who are proud, one of us of hisIrish descent and the other of his Irish birth, to think that the sonsand daughters of mother Erin have so conspicuously distinguishedthemselves in such varied spheres of activity in every