do justice to Ireland! What marvel is it, then, that gentlemen opposite
should deal in such vehement protestations? There is, however, one man, of
great abilities,--not a member of this House, but whose talents and whose
boldness have placed him in the topmost place in his party,--who,
disdaining all imposture, and thinking it the best course to appeal
directly to the religious and national antipathies of the people of this
country,--abandoning all reserve, and flinging off the slender veil by
which his political associates affect to cover, although they cannot hide,
their motives,--distinctly and audaciously tells the Irish people that they
are not entitled to the same privileges as Englishmen; and pronounces them,
in any particular which could enter his minute enumeration of the
circumstances by which fellow-citizenship is created, in race, identity,
and religion to be aliens--to be aliens in race--to be aliens in
country--to be aliens in religion! Aliens! Good God! was Arthur, Duke of
Wellington, in the House of Lords,--and did he not start up and exclaim,
"Hold! I have seen the aliens do their duty!"

The Duke of Wellington is not a man of an excitable temperament. His mind
is of a cast too martial to be easily moved; but, notwithstanding his
habitual inflexibility, I cannot help thinking that, when he heard his
Roman Catholic countrymen (for we are his countrymen) designated by a
phrase as offensive as the abundant vocabulary of his eloquent confederate
could supply,--I cannot help thinking that he ought to have recollected the
many fields of fight in which we have been contributors to his renown. "The
battles, sieges, fortunes, that he has passed," to have come back upon him.
He ought to have remembered that, from the earliest achievement in which he
displayed that military genius which has placed him foremost in the annals
of modern warfare, down to that last and surpassing combat which has made
his name imperishable,--from Assaye to Waterloo,--the Irish soldiers, with
whom your armies are filled, were the inseparable auxiliaries to the glory