ur own. Surely this cannot be the meaning of America's message to
mankind glowing from the pen of her illustrious President?

In the 750 years during which the stranger sway has blighted Ireland her
people have never had occasion to welcome an unselfish or generous deed
at the hands of their rulers. Every so-called "concession" was but the
loosening of a fetter. Every benefit sprang from a manipulation of our
own money by a foreign Treasury denying us an honest audit of accounts.
None was yielded as an act of grace. All were the offspring of
constraint, tumult, or political necessity. Reason and arguments fell on
deaf ears. To England the Union has brought enhanced wealth, population,
power, and importance; to Ireland increased taxation, stunted
industries, swollen emigration, and callous officialism.

Possessing in this land neither moral nor intellectual pre-eminence, nor
any prestige derived from past merit or present esteem, the British
Executive claims to restrain our liberties, control our fortunes, and
exercise over our people the power of life and death. To obstruct the
recent Home Rule Bill it allowed its favourites to defy its Parliament
without punishment, to import arms from suspect regions with impunity,
to threaten "to break every law" to effectuate their designs to infect
the Army with mutiny and set up a rival Executive backed by military
array to enforce the rule of a caste against the vast majority of the
people. The highest offices of State became the guerdon of the
organisers of rebellion, boastful of aid from Germany. To-day they are
pillars of the Constitution, and the chief instrument of law. The only
laurels lacking to the leaders of the Mutineers are those transplanted
from the field of battle!

Are we to fight to maintain a system so repugnant, and must Irishmen be
content to remain slaves themselves after freedom for distant lands has
been purchased by their blood?

Heretofore in every clime, whenever the weak called for a defender,
wherever the flag of liberty was unfurled, that blood freely flowed.
Profiting by Irish sympathy with righteous causes Britain, at the
outbreak of war, attracted to her armies tens of thousands of our youth
ere even the Western Hemisphere had awakened to the wail of "small
nations."

Irishmen, in their chivalrous eagerness, laid themselves open to the
reproach from some of their brethren of forgetting the woes of their own
land, which had suffered from its rul