John Mitchel

“ I laughed outright here on Tuesday night last at the suspicious warmth with which Dublin merchants, as if half afraid of themselves, protested so anxiously that they would yield in loyalty to none. They, democrats by nature and position, meeting there without a nobleman to countenance them, with the Queen's representative scowling black upon them from his castle, are—they declare it with most nervous solemnity—loyal men. ”

“ You can hardly believe that creatures with the gait and aspect of men could have been brought to this. And you cannot wonder that they should have been slow, slow in struggling upward out of such darkness and desolation. But I tell you the light has at length come to them; the flowery spring of this year is the dawning of their day; and before the cornfields of Ireland are white for the reaper our eyes shall see the sun flashing gloriously, if the heavens be kind to us, 'on a hundred thousand pikes. ”

“ That all who pay taxes should have a voice in the outlay of those taxes is not one of our institutions—that those who create the whole wealth of the State by their labour should get leave to live like Christians on the fruits of that labour—this is not amongst the institutions of the country. Tenant-right is not an institution of the country. ”

“ And for the "institutions of the country," I loathe and despise them. We are sickening and dying of these institutions fast; they are consuming us like a plague, degrading us to paupers in mind, body, and estate—yes, making our very souls beggarly and cowardly. They are a failure and a fraud, these institutions. From the topmost crown jewel to the meanest detective's notebook there is no soundness in them. God and man are weary of them. ”

“ The Irish noble and the British statesman want the very same thing: they are both a tail. The grand master knows that if you stick by your loyalty and uphold the British connection you secure to him his coronet, his influence, and his rental—discharged of tenant-right and all plebeian claims. And Lord Clarendon knows on his side that if you uphold landlordism and abandon tenant-right and bend all your energies to resisting the "encroachments of Popery" you thereby perpetuate British dominion in Ireland and keep the "Empire" going yet a little while. ”

“ Yet there is one lesson you must learn—fraternal respect for your countrymen of the South, and that sympathy with them and faith in them without which there can be no vital nationality in Ireland. You little know the history and sore trials and humiliations of this ancient Irish race; ground and trampled first for long ages into the very earth, and then taught—expressly taught—in solemn harangues r and even in sermons, that it was their duty to die, and see their children die before their faces r rather than resist their tyrants, as men ought. ”

“ In fact religious hatred has been kept alive in Ireland longer than anywhere else in Christendom, just for the simple reason that Irish landlords and British statesmen found their own account in it, and so soon as Irish landlordism and British dominion are finally rooted out of the country it will be heard of no longer in Ireland any more than it is in France or Belgium now. ”

“ You have not yet learned the litany of slaves and the whine of beaten hounds and the way to die a coward's death. No; let once the great idea of your country's destiny seize on you, my kinsmen, and the way will be plain before you as a pike-staff twelve feet long. ”

“ A modern king, my friends, is no more like an ancient anointed shepherd of the people than an archbishop's apron is like the Urim and Thummim. There is no divine right now but in The Sovereign People. ”

“ Lord Enniskillen, and every other commonly informed man, knows that there is now no Protestant interest at all; that there is absolutely nothing left for Protestant and Catholic to quarrel for. Even the Church Establishment is not a Catholic and Protestant question, inasmuch as all Dissenters and all plebeian Churchmen are as much concerned to put an end to that nuisance as Catholics are. ”

“ Nobody in all Europe would now as much a& understand it—and if any man talks to you now of religious sects, when the matter in hand relates to civil and political rights, to administration of government or distribution of property—depend upon it, though he wear a coronet on his head, he means to cheat you. ”