every movement devised for the furtherance of the common weal. Not a few Irish-Catholic charities in the principal Australasian cities number Protestant ladies and gentlemen amongst their most generous patrons and subscribers. This well-known and pleasing fact was once felicitously referred to by Mr. Dalley, in addressing a Sydney audience, as "a proof of their enjoyment of a civilisation which made the efforts of the intolerant and the fanatical mere exhibitions of impotent malignity, which could have no effect whatever upon the actions of the good and the gentle."
Lady Wilde ("Speranza"), writing a few years ago in a London magazine, prophesied that "the Australian Irish will in time be as powerful a people as their American kindred," and expressed her conviction that "the chances of wealth are even greater in Australia" than in the republic of the west. The famed poetess of the Young Ireland era went further, and anticipated a day when the Australian Irish would "return to green Erin and buy up the estates of the pauperised landlords." This would certainly be a sensational dramatic revenge—the evicted coming back with well-filled purses to enter into possession of the properties of the once harsh but now humble evictors—but it is by no means beyond the range of probability, in view of the remarkable rapidity with which large fortunes have been accumulated in Australia by Irishmen who landed there with nothing to bless themselves with, save the clothes on their backs and the few shillings in their dilapidated pockets.
When it is remembered that the marvellous progress detailed in the foregoing pages, to which Irish brains, courage, and enterprise contributed so much, has taken place within the lifetime of a single generation, no one will be surprised at the glowing anticipations in which many writers
