ressed Catholic
brethren to lay aside their weapons, and with pure hearts and naked hands
to stand firmly together in the calm but determined energy of men, too
humane for deeds of violence, yet too mighty for the patient endurance of
wrong.

The spirit of the olden time was awakened, of the day when Flood
thundered and Curran lightened; the light which shone for a moment in the
darkness of Ireland's century of wrong burned upwards clearly and
steadily from all its ancient altars. Shoulder to shoulder gathered
around him the patriot spirits of his nation,--men unbribed by the golden
spoils of governmental patronage Shiel with his ardent eloquence, O'Dwyer
and Walsh, and Grattan and O'Connor, and Steel, the Protestant agitator,
wearing around him the emblem of national reconciliation, of the reunion
of Catholic and Protestant,--the sash of blended orange and green, soiled
and defaced by his patriotic errands, stained with the smoke of cabins,
and the night rains and rust of weapons, and the mountain mist, and the
droppings of the wild woods of Clare. He united in one mighty and
resistless mass the broken and discordant factions, whose desultory
struggles against tyranny had hitherto only added strength to its
fetters, and infused into that mass his own lofty principles of action,
until the solemn tones of expostulation and entreaty, bursting at once
from the full heart of Ireland, were caught up by England and echoed back
from Scotland, and the language of justice and humanity was wrung from
the reluctant lips of the cold and remorseless oppressor of his native
land, at once its disgrace and glory,--the conqueror of Napoleon; and, in
the words of his own Curran, the chains of the Catholic fell from around
him, and he stood forth redeemed and disenthralled by the irresistible
genius of Universal Emancipation.

On the passage of the bill for Catholic emancipation, O'Connell took his
seat in the British Parliament. The eyes of millions were upon him.
Ireland--betrayed so often by those in whom she had placed her
confidence; brooding in sorrowful remembrance over the noble names and
brilliant reputations sullied by treachery and corruption, the long and
dark catalogue of her recreant sons, who, allured by British gold and
British patronage, had sacrificed on the altar of their ambition Irish
pride and Irish independence, and lifted their parricidal arms against
their sorrowing mother, "crownless and voiceless in her woe"