Dr. Charles Lucas was, even more than Swift perhaps, the precursor of that type of Irish publicist and journalist, of which there have been many splendid examples since then in Ireland, England, and America.  Lucas first started the Censor, a weekly journal, in 1748.  Within two years his paper was suppressed for exciting discontent with the government, and to avoid a prosecution he fled to England.  In 1763 the Freeman’s Journal was established by three Dublin merchants.  Lucas, who had returned from a long exile and was a member of the Irish parliament, contributed to it, sometimes anonymously but generally over the signature of “A Citizen” or “Civis.”  The editor was Henry Brooks, novelist, poet, and playwright.  His novel, The Fool of Quality, is still read.  His tragedy, The Earl of Essex, was, wrongly, supposed to contain a precept, “Who rules o’er freemen should himself be free,” which led to the more famous parody of Dr. Samuel Johnson, “Who drives fat oxen should himself be fat.”  The object of Lucas and Brooke, as journalists, was to awaken national sentiment, by teaching that Ireland had an individuality of her own independently of England.  But they were more concerned with the assertion of the constitutional rights of the parliament of the Protestant colony as against the domination of England.  Therefore, the first organ of Irish Nationality, representative of all creeds and classes, was the Press, the newspaper of the United Irishmen, which was started in Dublin in 1797, by Arthur O’Connor, the son of a rich merchant who had made his money in London.  Its editor was Peter Finnerty, born of humble parentage at Loughrea, afterwards a famous parliamentary reporter for the London Morning Chronicle, and its most famous contributor was Dr. William Drennan, the poet, who first called Ireland “the Emerald Isle.”

Irishmen did not become prominently associated with American journalism until after the Famine and the collapse of the Young Ireland movement in 1848.  The journalist whom I regard as having exercised the most fateful influence on the destinies of Ireland was Charles Gavan Duffy, the founder and first editor of the Nation, a newspaper of which it was truly and finely said that it brought a new soul into Erin.  Among its contributors, who afterwards added lustre to the journalism of the United States, was John Mitchel.  In the Southern Citizen and the Richmond Enquirer he supported the South against the North in the Civil War.  The Rev. Abram Joseph Ryan, who was associated with journalism in New Orleans, not only acted as a Catholic chaplain with the Confederate army, but sang of its hopes and aspirations in tuneful verse.  Serving in the army of the North was Charles G. Halpine, whose songs signed “Private Miles O’Reilly” were very popular in those days of national convulsion in the United States.  Halpine’s father had edited the Tory newspaper, the Dublin Evening Mail;