Produced by David Widger
Often while I have been studying the records of colonisation in the NewWorld I have thought of you and your difficult work in Ireland; and Ihave said to myself, "What a time he would have had if he had beenViceroy of the Indies in 1493!" There, if ever, was the chance for aDepartment such as yours; and there, if anywhere, was the place for theEconomic Man. Alas! there war only one of him; William Ires or Eyre, byname, from the county Galway; and though he fertilised the soil he did itwith his blood and bones. A wonderful chance; and yet you see what cameof it all. It would perhaps be stretching truth too far to say that youare trying to undo some of Columbus's work, and to stop up the hole hemade in Ireland when he found a channel into which so much of what wasbest in the Old Country war destined to flow; for you and he have eachyour places in the great circle of Time and Compensation, and though youmay seem to oppose one another across the centuries you are reallyanswering the same call and working in the same vineyard. For we all setout to discover new worlds; and they are wise who realise early thathuman nature has roots that spread beneath the ocean bed, that neitherlatitude nor longitude nor time itself can change it to anything richeror stranger than what it is, and that furrows ploughed in it are furrowsploughed in the sea sand. Columbus tried to pour the wine ofcivilisation into very old bottles; you, more wisely, are trying to pourthe old wine of our country into new bottles. Yet there is no greatunlikeness between the two tasks: it is all a matter of bottling; thevintage is the same, infinite, inexhaustible, and as punctual as the sunand the seasons. It was Columbus's weakness as an administrator that hethought the bottle was everything; it is your strength that you care forthe vintage, and labour to preserve its flavour and soft fire.
Yours,
FILSON YOUNG.
RUAN MINOR, September 1906.
The writing of historical biography is properly a work of partnership, towhich public credit is awarded too often in an inverse proportion to thelabours expended. One group of historians, labouring in the obscurestdepths, dig and prepare the ground, searching and sifting the documentarysoil with infinite labour and over an area immensely wide. They arefollowed by those scholars and specialists in history who give theirlives to the study of a single period, and who sow literature in thefurrows of research prepared by those who have preceded them. Last ofall comes the essayist, or writer pure and simple, who reaps the harvestso laboriously prepared. The material lies all before him; the documentshave been arranged, the immense contemporary fields of record andknowledge examined and searched for stray seeds of significance that mayhave blown over into them; the perspective is cleared for him, therelation of his facts to time and space and the march of humancivilisation duly established; he has nothing to do but reap the field ofharvest where it suits him, grind it in the wheels of whatever machineryhis art is equipped with, and come before the public with the finishedproduc