Was the realisation of a distinctive national existence, many began to ask themselves, to be for ever dependent upon the fortunes of a political campaign?
In any scheme of a reconstructed national life to which the Irish would give of their best, there must be distinctiveness--that much every man who is in touch with Irish life is fully aware of--but the question of existence must not be altogether ignored.

At the rate the people were leaving the sinking ship, the Irish Question would be settled in the not distant future by the disappearance of the Irish.

Had we not better look around and see how other countries with more or less analogous conditions fared?
Could we not--Unionists and Nationalists alike--do something towards material progress without abandoning our ideals?
Could we not learn something from a study of what our people were doing abroad?
One seemed to hear the voice of Bishop Berkeley, the biting pertinence of whose _Queries_ is ever fresh, asking from the grave in which he had been laid to rest nearly a century and a half ago 'whether it would not be more reasonable to mend our state than complain of it; and how far this may be in our own power ?' These questionings, though not generally heard on the platform or even in the street, were none the less working in the depths of the Irish mind, and found expression not so much in words as in deeds.

Yet though the downfall of Parnell released many minds from the obsession of politics, the influence of that event was of a negative character, and it took time to produce a beneficial effect.

That fruitful last decade of the nineteenth century saw the foundation of what will some day be recognised as a new philosophy of Irish progress.