Law the Scottish General, Abercromby,
Commander-in-Chief in Ireland, wrote: "Every crime, every cruelty that
could be committed by Cossacks or Calmucks has been transacted here....
The abuses of all kinds I found can scarcely be believed or enumerated."
Lord Holland recalls that many people "were sold at so much a head to
the Prussians."

We shall, therefore, pass by the story of the destruction of our
manufactures, of artificial famines, of the fomentation of uprisings, of
a hundred Coercion Acts, culminating in the perpetual "Act of
Repression" obtained by forgery, which graced Queen Victoria's Jubilee
Year in 1887. In our island the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act, the
repression of free speech, gibbetings, shootings, and bayonetings, are
commonplace events. The effects of forced emigration and famine American
generosity has softened; and we do not seek a verdict on the general
merits of a system which enjoys the commendation of no foreigner except
Albert, Prince Consort, who declared that the Irish "were no more worthy
of sympathy than the Poles."

It is known to you how our population shrank to its present fallen
state. Grants of money for emigration, "especially of families," were
provided even by the Land Act of 1881. Previous Poor Law Acts had
stimulated this "remedy." So late as 1891 a "Congested District" Board
was empowered to "aid emigration," although millions of Irishmen had in
the nineteenth century been evicted from their homes or driven abroad.

Seventy years ago our population stood at 8,000,000, and, in the normal
ratio of increase, it should to-day amount to 16,000,000. Instead, it
has dwindled to 4,500,000; and it is from this residuum that our manhood
between the ages of eighteen and fifty-one is to be delivered up in such
measure as the strategists of the English War Cabinet may demand.

To-day, as in the days of George Washington, nearly half the American
forces have been furnished from the descendants of our banished race. If
England could not, during your Revolution, regard that enrolment with
satisfaction, might she not set something now to Ireland's credit from
the racial composition of your Army or Navy? No other small nation has
been so bereft by law of her children, but in vain for Ireland has the
bread of exile been thrown upon the waters.

Yet, while Self-determination is refused, we are required by law to
bleed to "make the world safe for democracy "--in every country except
o