emains to us.

One Parsons, an English settler in Ireland, had written to a friend
to say that, among other things, the head of the Colonel of an Irish
regiment then in the field against the English, would not be allowed
to stick long on its shoulders. The letter was intercepted by the very
regiment itself, and a captain in it, Felim O'Molloy, wrote back to
Parsons:

"I will do this if you please: I will pick out sixty men and fight
against one hundred of your choice men if you do but pitch your camp
one mile out of your town, and then if you have the victory, you may
threaten my Colonel; otherwise, do not reckon your chickens before
they are hatched."

The Anglo-Saxon preferred "politic courses" to accepting the Irish
soldier's challenge, even where all the advantage was conceded by
the Irishman to his foe and all the risks, save that of treachery (a
very necessary precaution in dealing with the English in Ireland),
cheerfully accepted by the Celt.

This advantage of the "better bodies" the Irish retained beyond all
question up to the Famine. It was upon it alone that the Wexford
peasantry relied in 1798, and with and by it alone that they again and
again, armed with but pike and scythe swept disciplined regiments of
English mercenaries in headlong rout from the field.

This physical superiority of his countrymen was frequently referred to
by O'Connell as one of the forces he relied on. With the decay of all
things Irish that has followed the Famine, these physical attributes
have declined along with so much else that was typical of the nation
and the man.

It could not to-day be fearlessly affirmed that sixty Irishmen were
more than a match for one hundred Englishmen; yet depleted as it is
by the emigration of its strongest and healthiest children, by growing
sickness and a changed and deteriorated diet the Irish race still
presents a type, superior physically, intellectually and morally to
the English. It was on Irish soldiers that the English chiefly relied
in the Boer War, and it is no exaggeration to say that could all
the Irishmen in the ranks of the British army have been withdrawn, a
purely British force would have failed to end the war and the Dutch
would have remained masters of the field in South Africa.

It was the inglorious part of Ireland to be linked with those "methods
of barbarism" she herself knew only too well, in extinguishing the
independence of a people who were attacked by the same enem