ar
the form or reduce the strength, but nothing crushes the inward resolve
of the heart. The Americans were never so American as when they revolted
against England and threw the tea overboard into Boston harbor, and
punished the Red-Coats at Bunker Hill. The heavy yoke of Austria rested
grievously upon Hungary, but they raised themselves in revolt and fought
fearlessly for their home rule, for their freedom and their rights. And
they were defeated by treason in their camps and by the combined forces
of Austria and Russia. Yet, sir, they persevered until they achieved
home rule--as will Ireland at no distant day.

The long history of oppression and injustice in Ireland has not only not
extinguished the flame of Irish patriotism and feeling, but has served
to kindle it, to make it more glowing to-day than ever before. For seven
centuries Ireland has wrestled with and been subjected to misrule--to
England's misrule: a rule great and noble in many things, as her
priceless statesman says, but with this one dark, terrible stain upon an
otherwise noble history. Only a day or two ago there reached our shores
the last number of an English periodical, containing an article from the
pen of that great statesman, to whom not only all Ireland, but all the
civilized world is looking to-day to battle for freedom in England. The
article presents, in the most striking form that I have ever seen,
statements of what is properly called Ireland's demands. And I was
struck there with the most extraordinary statement coming from this
great statesman of England, of the character of England's rule, or
rather England's misrule, of Ireland during those seven centuries. For
all those centuries, he says, were centuries not only of subjection, but
of extreme oppression. The fifth century was the century of
confiscation; the sixth was a century of penal laws--penal laws, which,
he says, "we cannot defend and which we must condemn and wash our hands
of the whole proceedings"--a century of penal laws, except from 1778 to
1795, which he calls the golden age of Ireland. And as I stop for a
moment to recollect what had distinguished that period, and as you stop
here to-night and recollect for a single moment what had distinguished
that short period of that century and made it the golden age of Ireland,
you will understand why it was so called. It was the period when Henry
Grattan, the great leader of the first battle for home rule, poured
forth his learned