birthright of freedom? Why? Are ye men of Ireland so craven that
aliens can rule ye as they once ruled the negro?" ("No, no!") "The
African slave has been emancipated and his emancipation was through
the blood and tears of the people who wronged him. Let OUR
emancipation, then, be through the blood and tears of our
oppressors. In other nations it is the Irishman who rules. It is
only in his own counthry that he is ruled. And the debt of hathred
and misery and blasted lives and dead hopes is at our door today.
Shall that debt be unpaid?" ("No, no!") "Look around you. Look at
the faces of yer brothers and sisthers, worn and starved. Look at
yer women-kind, old before they've been young. Look at the babies at
their mothers' breasts, first looking out on a wurrld in which they
will never know a happy thought, never feel a joyous impulse, never
laugh with the honest laughther of a free and contented and God-and-
government-protected people. Are yez satisfied with this?" (Angry
cries of "No, no!")

"Think of yer hovels--scorched with the heat, blisthered with the
wind and drenched with the rain, to live in which you toil that
their owners may enjoy the fruits of yer slavery--IN OTHER
COUNTHRIES. Think of yer sons and daughthers lavin' this once fair
land in hundhreds of thousands to become wage-earners across the
seas, with their hearts aching for their homes and their loved ones.
The fault is at our own door. The solution is in our own hands.
Isn't it betther to die, pike in hand, fightin' as our forefathers
did, than to rot in filth, and die, lavin' a legacy of disease and
pestilence and weak brains and famished bodies?" His voice cracked
and broke into a high-pitched hysterical cry as he finished the
peroration.