the Irish people; if they
could hear them, as I do, quote the electric words of their renowned
Curran against slavery, and in favor of _universal emancipation_; if
they could listen, as they repeated the still bolder and scathing
denunciations of their great orator, O'Connell, as he trampled on the
dehumanizing system of chattel slavery, they would scorn the advice of
the traitor leaders, who, under the false guise of Democracy, but in
hostility to all its principles, would now lure them, by the syren cry
of peace, into the destruction of the Union, which guards their rights,
and protects their interests.

The convention now assembled at Chicago, can do much to inaugurate a new
era of civilization, freedom, and progress, by aiding in giving to the
nation these great interior routes of commerce and intercourse, in the
centre of which your great city will hold the urn, as the long-divorced
waters of the lakes and the Mississippi are again commingled, and the
Union linked together by the imperishable bonds of commerce, interest,
and affection.

WOMAN.

The ever-present phenomenon of revolution bears two forms. They may be
discrete or concrete, but they are two--ideas, movement,--cause,
result--force, effect. And progressive humanity marches upon its future
with ideas for its centre, movement its right and left wings. Not a step
is taken till the Great Field-Marshal has sent his orders along the
lines.

Revolutions go by periods. Are they possibly controlled or influenced in
these years by the stellar affinities of the north pole? Is that
capricious functionary leading up to Casseopeia, in this cycle, or
Andromeda, that we find ourselves turning from great Hercules, fiery
Bootes, and even neglecting the shining majesty of belted, sworded
Orion, to consider woman? I have not consulted the astronomers. The
stars of the heavens are in their places. Male and female, the groups
come to us in winter and retire in summer: their faint splendors fall
down upon our harvest nights, and then give way to the more august
retinue of the wintry solstice. The boreal pivot, whose journal is the
awful, compact blue, may, for aught I know, be hobnobbing at this moment
with the most masculine of starry masculinities. But if it be, it is in
little sympathy with the magnetic pole of human thought, whose fine
point turns unwaveringly in these days of many revolutions to woman as
the centre and leader of the grandest of them all.

A