"There was a payriod," retorted Tom, "when England could have done
somethin to appase Ireland, but that payriod is past and gone
forever! Durin the airly days of O'Connell, the repale of the Union
and the abolition of the Church Establishment would have worked
merricles. These measures would have done away with absenteeism, an
unjust and gallin taxation, and would have given Ireland the
conthrol, in some degree at laste, of her own local affairs. If the
Act of 1782 previntin England from intherfarin in any degree in those
affairs was revived, it would have given the Irish a chance to build
up their manufactures and recruit their ruined thrade and commerce.
It would have recalled the landlord to his estates, from forrin
parts, and re-inthroduced a native parliament that understood the
wants and wishes of the people, and that was intherested in carryin
them out, and givin the masses an opportunity of developin their
resources and turnin their soil to account, that is acre for acre
more fertile than that of England, to-day. It would have gathered
home from the four winds of the earth the scatthered wealth that has
followed the absentee to distant lands and made Dublin and Cork and
every city in the counthry alive with min and wimmin, that were able
to pathronise Irish manufactures, aye, and pay for them too. All this
it would have done and a thousand times more; but as I have already
said, the chance has been thrown away by England, never to be
recovered by her durin _secula seculorum_; for now the light of
American freedom has fallen upon Ireland, and, pointed out what ought
to be her thrue standin, and the insufficiency of what she once would
have been satisfied with. In the broad effulgence of its glory, the
people of Ireland now persave that so if long as they attached any
importance to the mere accident of birth, or bent the knee to
hereditary monarchy, they were but walking in the valley and shadow
of death. The great moral spectacle of American freedom built upon