They differ from leaders of other countries, who divide the average pittances of success or ill success on the road to honored retirement.  Few of the heroes among modern nations have left such vivid and lasting memory as “the strong men of Ireland.”  During the nineteenth century their lore and cult have traversed the whole world in the wake of the great emigrations.  Whether they failed or succeeded in wresting the independence and ideals of Ireland for a while from the fell clutch of circumstance, they live with their race forever.

Under Plantagenet and Tudor rule, the Irish leaders presented a sullen but armed resistance.  A never completed invasion was met by sporadic raids and successive risings.  A race of military outlaws was fashioned, which accounts for much in Irish character today.  Previously the Irish, like all Celtic civilization, was founded on the arts, on speech, and on law, rather than on war and feudalism.

Even Irish militancy was crushed in the Williamite wars, and the race, deprived of its original subsistence as well as of its acquired defense, sank into the stupor of penal times.  Those who should have been leaders of Ireland became marshals of Austria and France.

Gradually it was learnt that the pen is mightier than the sword and the human voice more potent than the sound of cannon—­and the constitutional struggle developed, not without relapse and reverse.  To Dean Swift must be attributed the change in the national weapon and the initiation of a leadership of resistance within the law, which has lasted into modern times.  Accident made Swift an Irishman, and a chance attempt to circulate debased coins in Ireland for the benefit of a debased but royal favorite made him a patriot.  Swift drove out Wood’s halfpence at the pen-point.  He shamed the government, he checked the all-powerful Walpole, and he roused the manhood of Ireland towards independence in legislation.  He never realized what a position history would give him.  To himself he seemed a gloomy failure, to his contemporaries a popular pamphleteer, but to posterity he is the creator of public conscience in Ireland.  He was the father of patriotic journalism, and the first to defend Ireland’s rights through literature.  Though his popularity was quenched in lunacy, his impress upon Irish politics remains as powerful and lasting as upon English literature.

Within the so-called Irish parliament sprang forth the first of a long line of orators, Henry Flood.  He was the first to study the Constitution for purposes of opposition.  He attacked vice-regal government in its own audit-house.  Pension and corruption he laid bare, and upon the people he breathed a spirit of independence.  Unfortunately he was not content with personal prominence.  He accepted office, hoping thereby to benefit Ireland.  His voice became lost to the higher cause, and another man rose in his stead, Henry Grattan.  The American war tested the rival champions of Liberty.  Flood favored