rescued for holy uses. The same
night after the execution, a great crowd flocked about the gallows,
and there spent the fore part of the night in heathenish howling, and
performing many Popish ceremonies; and after midnight, being then
Candlemas day, in the morning having their priests present in
readiness, they had Mass after Mass till, daylight being come, they
departed to their own houses." There was "sympathy with sedition" for
you, gentlemen. No wonder the crown official who tells the
story--same worthy predecessor of Mr. Harrison--should be horrified
at such a demonstration. I will sadden you with no further
illustrations of English law, but I think it will be admitted that
after centuries of such law, one need not wonder if the people hold
it in "hatred and contempt." With the opening of the seventeenth
century, however, came a golden and glorious opportunity for ending
that melancholy--that terrible state of things. In the reign of James
I., English law, for the first time, extended to every corner of this
kingdom. The Irish came into the new order of things frankly and in
good faith; and if wise counsels prevailed then amongst our rulers,
oh, what a blessed ending there might have been to the bloody feud of
centuries. The Irish submitted to the Gaelic King, to whom had come
in the English crown. In their eyes he was of a friendly, nay of a
kindred race. He was of a line of Gaelic kings that had often
befriended Ireland. Submitting to him was not yielding to the brutal
Tudor. Yes, that was the hour, the blessed opportunity for laying the
foundation of a real union between the three kingdoms; a union of
equal national rights under the one crown. This was what the Irish
expected; and in this sense they in that hour accepted the new
dynasty. And it is remarkable that from that day to this, though
England has seen bloody revolutions and violent changes of rulers,
Ireland has ever held faithfully--too faithfully--to the sovereignty
thus adopted. But how were they received? How were their expectations
met? By persecution, proscription, and wholesale plunder, even by
that miserable Stuart. His son came to the throne. Disaffection broke
out in England and Scotland. Scottish Protestant Fenians, called
"Covenanters," took the field against him, because of the attempt to
establish Episcopalian Protestantism as a state chu