tically an active agent for Irish interests in London.[1] Whitty pressed on me to carry the Nation to London from quite a new motive.
My maxim, he said, is, and always has been, that the Battle of Ireland is to be fought in England. Scipio saved Rome at Carthage. But what other force to fight it is there than the Nation? I despair of the Irish members. They strike me as the most worthless of mankind. If the Nation were mine, I would double its size and sell it at fourpence. And I would publish it in London.
He consulted his father, and that more practical man was of an opinion almost identical with Dillon's.
"Touching the Nation in London (he wrote to his son) my deliberate opinion is against it. As it would necessarily be Irish and Catholic, none but Irish would support it, and few but those who now take the Dublin Nation would then take the London Nation. There is one thing, however, of which I have no doubt. If Mr. Duffy bestowed the same ability, &c., on a weekly paper in London that he does on the Nation in Dublin, he would have five times the profit and influence. I mean a democratic journal—fearless and talented, friendly to Catholicism, but not its organ. Such a paper would succeed, and do more real good to the cause of Ireland than all the pro-Catholic papers published."
But I was immovable in the conviction that the Nation must not be detached from the soil of which it aimed to be racy.
From the beginning gifted women were among, the best beloved contributors to the Nation, and the revived Nation was destined to rally recruits of the same class. Julia Kavanagh, who was earning her income by literary work for English periodicals, proffered to aid the new experiment, without payment or applause, by her facile pen. Her letter is a touching illustration of the unconquerable sentiment of nationality which lives in the Irish heart:—
- ↑ Edward Whitty will probably be best remembered by his piquant articles in the Leader on the "Governing Classes" and "The Stranger in Parliament," a running commentary on public affairs, from which Richard Doyle once assured me he derived all the knowledge of them he ever needed. But his greatest work was his novel "The Friends of Bohemia," a political and social panorama which Thackeray need not have been ashamed to own.
