The record of England in relation to Ireland, is one of the most
atrocious known to the history of mankind. It is fraught with the
blackest ingratitude, the vilest injustice, and the direst
oppression. Notwithstanding that Ireland first gave her an alphabet,
and taught her how to spell her name--notwithstanding that Irish
missionaries had nurtured her early educational institutions and
reclaimed her from Paganism, she misrepresented their religion and
their learning in high places, stole in upon them while they slept,
and turning upon them like the frozen snake in the fable, robbed them
of their independence, and loaded them with chains. Every year of her
accursed dominion upon their shores has been marked with some new and
overwhelming oppression. She has spit upon their creed, broken their
altars, hunted them down with blood-hounds, robbed them of their
estates, exiled them penniless to foreign shores, banned their
language, murdered their offspring, destroyed their trade and
commerce, ruined their manufactures, plundered their exchequer,
robbed them of their flag, deprived them of their civil rights, and
left them, houseless wanderers, a prey to hunger, cold and rags, upon
their own soil. Of all this she stands convicted before the world;
and for all this she must alone, so sure as there is a God above her.
Ireland still lives, and so do her wrongs. The O'Neills and thousands
of brave scions of the past, are still with her, while the rank and
file of her sons are as bitterly opposed to English usurpation to-day
as they were seven hundred years ago. Besides, at the present hour,
the approaches to their final triumph are made luminous with the
generous countenance of free America, and the glorious conviction
that heaven bends benignly over them; and thus it is that they now
stand shoulder to shoulder in eager anticipation of the coming hour,
when their banners shall yet once more be flung to the winds, as,