Davis. Davis had himself been negotiating the possibility of a devolved parliament with the Northern reformer William Sharman Crawford. The difference with O'Connell was that Davis was seeking a basis for compromise, in the first instance, not at Westminster but in Belfast. Protestant inclusion When he first followed O'Connell, Duffy concedes that he had "burned with the desire to set up again the Celtic race and the catholic church". In The Nation he subscribed to a broader vision. In the journal's prospectus, Davis wrote of a "nationality" as ready to embrace "the stranger who is within our gates" as "the Irishman of a hundred generations". Davis (conscious of his family's Cromwellian origin) was persuaded by Johann Gottfried von Herder: nationality was not a matter of ancestry or blood but of acclimatising influences. Cultural traditions, and above all language, "the organ of thought", could engender in persons of diverse origin common national feeling. Davis was a keen promoter of the Irish language in print, at a time when, while still the speech of the vast majority of the Irish people, it had been all but abandoned by the educated classes. Such cultural nationalism did not appear to interest to O'Connell. There is no evidence that he saw the preservation or revival of his mother tongue, or any other aspect of "native culture", as essential to his political demands. His own paper, the Pilot, recognised but one "positive and unmistakable" marker of the national distinction between English and Irish—religion. O'Connell "treasured his few Protestant Repealers", but he acknowledged the central role of the Catholic clergy in his movement and guarded the bond it represented. In 1812/13 he had refused emancipation conditioned on Rome having to seek royal assent in the appointment of Irish bishops. Throughout much of the country the bishops and their priests were the only figures of standing independent of the government around which a national movement could organise. It was a reality on which the Repeal Association, like the Catholic Association before it, was built. In 1845 O'Connell, in advance of the bishops, denounced a "mixed" non-denominational scheme for tertiary education. The Anglicans could retain Trinity in Dublin; the Presbyterians might have the Queens College proposed for Belfast; but the Queens colleges intended for Galway and Cork had to be Catholic. When Davis (moved to tears in the controversy) pleaded that "reasons for separate education are reasons for [a]