determined to invent one; and there was brought to birth that modern
Ireland, passionate for freedom, which has occupied the stage ever
since. In our own time it has knit, as a fractured limb knits, into one
tissue with the tradition of the Gaelic peasantry. Hanging and burning,
torture and oppression, poison and Penal Laws, bribes and blackguardism
so far from exterminating the Irish people actually hammered them into a
nation, one and indestructible, proud of its past and confident of its
future.

Take instances still more recent and particular--the struggle for
religious freedom or the struggle for the land. Catholic emancipation is
a leading case: obstinacy against obstinacy, the No! of England against
the Yes! of Ireland, and the former sprawling in the ditch at the end of
the tussle. "The Law," ran the dictum of an eighteenth-century Lord
Chancellor, "does not suppose any such person to exist as an Irish
Roman Catholic." At this moment a Catholic holds the seals and purse of
the Chancellorship. Never did ministers swallow their own stubborn words
more incontinently than did Peel and Wellington. So late as 1828 Peel
was loudly declaring that the continuance of these bars, which excluded
the Catholics from the acquisition of political power, was necessary for
the maintenance of the Constitution and the safety of the Church, and
Wellington was echoing his words. A year later, utterly defeated by
O'Connell, Peel was introducing the Catholic Relief Bill in the Commons.
Wellington had it for his task to induce, or rather frighten the king to
assent. Ireland not only emancipated the Catholics, she went on to
emancipate the Dissenters, a service of freedom of conscience which is
too often forgotten.

The Tithe System was similarly declared to be part of the fabric of the
Constitution, to be upheld at the point of the bayonet. Scythe in hand,