or the other of these conditions, exert one or the other of these agencies, manifest one or the other of these elements. The man who for a time becomes substituted for a nation, is clothed in our regard with the national attributes. The people of Ireland, during nearly seven hundred years, have maintained a conflict for our common race, of resistance against force, freedom against power, right against usurpation. Through more than twenty years of that conflict, Daniel O'Connell was the impersonation of that people "A nation in a man compris'd." In this consists the secret of the interest he excited while living, and of all his fame now that he lives no more. It is his country, therefore, and only his country-as she was, as she is, and as she is to be that must be regarded, if we would fully comprehend and truly know the character of O'Connell. Ireland was long ago an independent nation, governed by a king and council or parliament, and was divided into inferior kingdoms and subordinate sects or clans. It had population and revenues equal to what were generally possessed by other states in the same age. One of its inhabitants thus described the kingdom a thousand years ago: "Far westward lies an isle of ancient fame, Her fruitful soil for ever teems with wealth, In war triumphant, and unmatched in peace." Ireland had then a court in which learning was honored next to royalty; a church that sent forth missionaries who converted a large portion of western Europe; laws that divided estates of the dead with equal justice; that gave the trial by jury-the Anglo-Saxon's boast; that ordained ínns for the entertainment of travellers at the public expense, and that knew only one capi tal or unpardonable crime. And it was treason and sacrilege to change those laws. There were trained bands which were sworn to resist even a seven-fold foe; knights who won renown for valor and courtesy on the plains of Palestine, and daines who were honored by admiring bards and minstrels in strains like these:"The daughter of Moran seized the harp! And her voice of music praised the strangers. Like a wreath of snow before the eye of the sun." I speak no interested, no partial, no imaginative eulogy. It is the testimony of general history, as accredited by modern learning. Alas, how unlike is this picture to Ireland now, in an age tenfold more enlightened and humane! What has wrought this change? Has Ireland degenerated, or has she been degraded and debased by foreign power? Did Ireland struggle, or did she resign herself to ruin? Listen, and you shall hear. Separated by only an ocean-channel, and colonized originally by the same Celtic race, the islands of Britain and Ireland have been distinguished by fortunes as wide as the poles. Britain, conquered by the Romans, the Danes, the Saxons, and the Normans, derived from that severe experience the consolidation, discipline, ambition, and energy, which have enabled it to grasp the empire of the world. Ireland, devoted to piety and learning, remaining long unconquered and unconquerable, and unmoved by cupidity or ambition, was early distracted by factions, and finally betrayed by them to a conqueror. In the twelfth century, Henry II., a Norman king of England, who held the refinements of life in much contempt, "cast in his mind" to conquer the adjoining island, "because it was commodious for him, and its people seemed to him savage and rude.” Invited by a native prince who had been dethroned, he appeared in Ireland with a real or forged grant under the seal of Breakspeare, an Englishman, who occupied the papal see at Rome, under the name of Adrian IV. Early converted to Christianity without the blood of martyrs, the Irish had nevertheless been the last to acknowledge the supremacy of Rome. Having received that article of faith, they have held it fast at the cost of ages of want, of millions of lives, and even of national existence. Ireland denied the pretensions of the pope to temporal power, and resisted the invader. Henry did not reinstate the Irish king, but established on the coast a martial colony; and by virtue of this acquisition, which was henceforth called the Pale, he claimed to be conqueror of the whole island. A royal deputy governed the Pale with a council of nobles and clergy, which afterward became a parliament, and the little domain was parcelled out by the king in great estates to court-favorites and military adventurers. The aristocracy of England was thus by fraud and force planted in the Island of Saints, as it was then reverently called Thenceforth its veins of silver and its dust of gold, the rubies of its lakes, the grain in its waving furrows, and the flocks on its thousand hills, were to pass away from its harmless people, to pamper despotic and insatiable lords. That august court, those ancient seminaries, those valiant bands, those chivalrous knights, that cynosure of beauty, and the bards who so worthily celebrated it, faded, declined, and were lost for ever! The establishment of the Pale enfeebled Ireland, although the colony was utterly incompetent to subjugate the kingdom. The colonists claimed to be masters of the island. The Irish, with the British power in the heart of the country, asserted their sovereignty and independence. Hence resulted a division which, perpetuated until now, has involved both in a common ruin. The distinction between the natives and the invaders was graven broad and deep by these conflicting titles, and by perpetual wars, inveterate policy, and clashing codes. The government of England acknowledged only the English inhabitants of the Pale as lawful subjects, and denounced the natives as "aliens," "wild Irish," and "enemies." Magna Charta and the common law were introduced within the Pale, but their protection was denied to the natives, while they were subjected to the power of the English courts. The Irish language and costume were inhibited, intermarriages forbidden, and naturalization under English laws denied. It was made lawful to kill an Irishman on suspicion, without trial or process, and unlawful to entertain an Irish minstrel, to keep an Irish servant, or to feed an Irish horse. The native princes, nobles, and knights, within the colony, were trodden down, and the wretched people, expelled on the one hand as aliens and rebels from their rightful possessions, and on the other by the native Septs into whose hands they were driven, were thus rendered houseless and desperate. Outlaws by statute and by VOL. III.-4 proclamation, they formed themselves from necessity into predatory bands, and, descending from the mountains, made reprisals on the Pale, and carried the war of fierce retaliation to the very gates of its cities. The ust of power soon discovered and opened that fountain whose bitter floods no art can stay nor purify. Ambitious Dublin robbed Armagh, the archiepiscopal see, of its treasures and sacred relics. The king of England rewarded the sacrilege with ecclesiastical authority over the island; proscribed from the ministry the natives who denounced the usurpation; and the English church within the Pale set the stamp of its approbation on the policy of the government by the atrocious dogma that it was not a sin to kill an Irishman. But it remained for the Tudors, the commonwealth, and the Guelphs, to sound the depths of fanaticism. Although the parliament of England vacillated long with the policy and caprice of the court, the conversion of the people of that country to the tenets of the Reformation resulted from a conviction that the religion of Luther was true. The Catholic church there was subverted. But England was in some sort connected with Ireland, and she must be converted in order that a superstitious prophecy might be fulfilled, which taught that the chair of St. Peter would fall when Ireland should cease to sustain it, and to the end also that Rome should not regain her ascendency in England through the agency of Catholic Ireland. England sent, to convert Ireland, not missionaries, but the sword. Rejecting the Catholic ritual because it was expressed in an unknown tongue, she sent the English prayer-book to a people ignorant of that language, and employed a ferocious soldiery to illustrate its real simplicity and beauty. The parliament of the Pale, like the sunflower, turned its revolving face to catch the royal smile, and received from Henry VIII., Edward VI., Mary, and Elizabeth, successively, a different religion with the same cheerful loyalty that it greeted "the new superscription and image of each on the coin of the kingdom." The Irish preferred their own long-cherished religion to that so rudely and inconsistently recommended to them by their enemies. Thenceforth ensued a war of confiscation and massacre reaching far toward our own time, and in which, although the parties remained unchanged, the hostility of races was lost in the terrible conflict of religious sects. England, exasperated by the firmness of Ireland, determined to extirpate her heresy by exterminating her people, and to supply their place with more orthodox colonies from Scotland as well as from the regions south of the Tweed. The genius of the versatile Bacon was tasked to make the new plantations grow, and the funds to carry on the exterminating war were obtained by mortgaging the lands to be conquered. No mercy was shown even to women or children in this war of faith. The Irish people fled before the destructive armies, and took refuge in caverns. Subsisting there on the fruits of the pasturage, and on the spoils taken from their invaders, they multiplied like the blades of grass, while their obnoxious faith became as firm as their mountain-homes. Then came new armies, driving the natives down upon the plains; and when it was found that famine and pestilence involved both parties in common destruction, the merciful concession was made that the entire Catholic population of Ireland should be allowed a refuge in a single province, there to remain, on pain of death if found beyond its borders. At length, in the year of the gospel of peace on earth and goodwill toward men, 1691-just five hundred and twenty years after the invasion by Henry - the wars which he began at first for conquest, and which afterward became a medley of rapine and fanaticism, came to an end by the treaty of Limerick after the battle of the Boyne: "Wearied with tedious war they cease, And both the kings and kingdoms plight the peace." What were the results of these long and furious wars? Ireland was conquered at last, and was despoiled. The aristocracy of England were owners and masters in Ireland, and its native possessors were tenants, servants, and slaves. The country contained eleven millions of acres of tillable land. One million were pos sessed by Englishmen who, having come to convert Ireland to Luther, had relapsed to Rome. Ten millions of acres were the property of English Protestant lords, and not one acre was left to the native Celtic Irishman. But the people of Ireland had not been exterminated. They constituted three fourths of the popu lation, and were more numerous than ever. What then? Had Ireland saved nothing? Had England gained everything? No! The aristocracy of England had gained a country they could not |