among which they move. Every where, in every clime and land, even among their nearest neighbours, among those whose language they speak and whose habits they acquire, their nationality is separate and distinct. In all their miseries and in all their oppressions they have kept virtues and qualities that fit them for a higher and a nobler condition than any they have filled for the last 700 years. Where are the affections of home and family stronger or more beautiful than in this down-trodden Irish land? Where is there more love or tenderness than round the poor Irishman's domestic hearth? Where is the hand of charity so freely extended to the poor? Where is the stranger so welcome to the share of the scanty meal? Where is the marriage tie more sacred? Where is female virtue more honoured? Where is there the same sense of religion that makes the pious prayer the household word of the father, the mother, and the child? In what other country will you find, in the humblest homestead, a piety that has no ostentation, and a charity that knows nothing of show, give to the poorest of the peasantry a simple courtesy and grace which riches cannot purchase, and education has often not imparted to their prosperous and well-to-do visitors from another land. And surely even those who do not kneel at their altars may yet marvel with awe and admiration at the supernatural fidelity with which the Irish people have clung to their ancient faith. All inducements of temporal advantages have failed to win them from that faith. All the blandishments of wealth-all the seductions of power-all the influence of rank and station, and superior education-have never shaken the faith of the Irish people. In persecution they have been true to it. In the severer trials of poverty and depression they have never bartered it away. Excluded from privilege-deprived of the rights of freedom-driven from the education he most valued, the Irish Catholic has continued Catholic, when by a conformity to the dominant faith he could have purchased admission to them all. The devotion of the Irish people to their religion stands out alone in the history of mankind as a monument of fidelity which nothing could shake of energy which nothing could subdue. It is something to which the annals of nations can raise no parallel. Records of individual heroism there are many in all ages and in every clime. Martyrs in all times and countries have left us the example of their constancy and their faith; but history records nothing like the fidelity and devotion with which in Ireland a whole people adhered to their religious belief Even now when persecution has passed away, and the love which persecution kindles might have waxed cold, the gorgeous churches with which the free-will offerings of a poor people are literally studding the land, supply a proof of national religious devotion and self-sacrifice such as few nations on the earth could supply. The more these things are thought of the more will strange reflections rush upon the mind. I do not believe that it is without a purpose that the God of nations has thus preserved and multiplied the Irish race-that their nationality has thus been kept separate and distinct. I do not believe that great and noble qualities like those of our people are never to find any higher employment than they have now. The observation might apply to many other things than those which I have enumerated. There is not an element necessary to make a great nation which Ireland does not possess― which was not abundantly proved and developed in the short interval of our independence. The Providence that bestowed upon Ireland these great qualities must surely intend that one day or other they would find their work to do. But is it altogether a vain imagination to believe that even in her sorrows and her sufferings Ireland may have been mysteriously kept and prepared for some high purpose which rance. in God's good time she is to fulfil? If persecution has its sharp and sore trials, it trains a people to fidelity and enduThe poverty of a country may save it from many of the evils which attend on luxury and wealth. If we have not had in Ireland the manufactures of England, we have escaped the fearful demoralization which some of those manufactures have brought with them to the masses of the people they employed. If we have not accumulated the great capital of England, our mercantile community have not been degraded and depraved by the gigantic and remorseless swindles by which financial agents have destroyed the once high character of English trade. Above all, we have not a population outgrowing the means of religious instruction, and living in a state of heathenism. It would be utterly impossible in Ireland for incidents to occur like those which we are assured by parliamentary papers to be common "in the black country," where grown up men and women knew nothing of Jesus Christ. In England there are many publications advocating infidel opinions, and enjoying a large circulation-in Ireland there is not one. Ireland is essentially a religious country, and men of all creeds shrink from the scepticism which is spreading rapidly through English society. I say it in deep sorrow, wealth and luxury have brought to all classes in England contaminations and abominations from which Ireland may rejoice that her poverty has kept her free. These things, and many things like these, suggest irresistibly to my mind the belief that Ireland is kept for some great purpose to be fulfilled, it may be, many a long year hence. The Providence that has watched over the Irish people has designed and is fitting them for some high and noble end. I know how easy it is for the scorner to point in mockery of such hopes to Ireland, torn, bleeding, and distracted as she is I know all the reproaches with which she may be now. her reproached. I do not conceal from myself the vices with which a false and anti-national system of government has corrupted the sentiment and enervated the spirit of too many of upper classes. I do not extenuate the faults from which no enslaved people were ever free. I know the power of the influences which weaken, and lower, and divide us. I have felt, and gauged, and mourned over all the discouragements which have shaken and marred the faith of many who were disposed to believe as I do. But I know also that there are in the Irish nation virtues, and energy, and spirit enough to rise above all these. I know that we have qualities as a nation which only need self-government, with its duties and its responsibilities, to bring them into great and glorious action, before which all those things that lower, and divide, and reproach us, will vanish away. It is in this sense I say that I am persuaded that Ireland has her destiny-some good purpose, for which, to use the words of Spenser, our country is "reserved." It would grieve me to think with Spenser, that "the Almighty hath reserved her for some secret scourge which by her shall come unto England." I rather look back to the traditions of the past-to the days when Ireland was “the land of saints"—when her missionaries carried learning and Christianity to the continent of Europe, and young men travelled from distant countries to learn religion and literature in her monasteries and her schools. May we not believe that the other alternative to which Spenser looked will be realized, "that the Almighty God hath at last appointed the times of her reformation”—of the reconstruction of her ancient greatness, and that with the passing away for ever of her "unquiet state," she may prove * Let no person reproach me with the assumption I make, that with the concession of self-government her unquietness would cease. I have perfect confidence in the tranquillizing powers of a free constitution. Who not the scourge but the strength and blessing of her sister land, returning to that sister good for evil. Most assuredly, in Ireland we possess the elements of a state which might exercise a good and beneficial influence, wherever that influence could extend; and if ever the time comes when the evil influences which unhappily exist in England should prevail in her social and political system over the virtues which unquestionably belong to a large portion of her people, it would be well for England herself that she had near her, and allied to her, a legislature and a nation which those corrupting influences had never reached. I know how easy it is to throw out the vulgar sneer which points to the religious dissensions of Irishmen as a source of disunion and quarrel among them sufficient ever to prevent us presenting the spectacle of an harmonious and united state. Those religious dissensions have been fostered, and are still fostered, by our English rulers for the benefit of English rule. With the abolition of English domination they will pass away. It was England which forced the reformed faith upon the Irish for the purposes of her own dominion, just as for her own purposes she had forced upon Ireland the requirements of the Bull of Pope Adrian IV. It was England that can forget the splendid imagery in which Burke has embodied a great truth:"Peace, order, and civilization followed in the train of liberty. When the day-star of the English Constitution had arisen in their hearts, all was harmony within and without "Simul alba nautis Stella refulsit, Defluit saxis agitatus humor: Speech on Conciliation with America. |