It has been the fate of a long line of patriotic young Irishmen since the days of the Act of Union to be cut short in the best promise of their youth; snatched away dramatically and suddenly in a crisis, they have left a memory which has, in all probability, been more cherished than if they had lived to a more mature age. Robert Emmet, Wolfe Tone, Lord Edward Fitzgerald, have through generations been the romantic figures of modern Irish history. It is impossible to think of them otherwise than as young men who had already done their work, in the service of the country to which they had devoted every fibre of their young strength. Thomas Davis, a generation later, is still remembered as the chief figure in the Young Ireland movement, while his abler colleague, Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, is half forgotten. Anticlimax has overtaken all the older leaders of the Irish people with a depth of personal tragedy which is scarcely paralleled in other countries. In Ireland, so long as the struggle for self-government was carried on, there could be no easy retirement nor honours for old age. Daniel O’Connell, Isaac Butt, Parnell, John Redmond, each in his turn, was practically hounded out of public life. Only those who died young have left an untarnished memory.

And no generation of young men in all Irish history has been decimated to the same extent as that of Kevin O’Higgins. I was at school with him at Clon-gowes; and looking back now at the list of those who seemed most full of promise among his contemporaries to within ten years or so, one stands aghast at the devastating record of their mortality.