It was this fidelity to principle on the part of the Irish Catholic people which won for them the alliance of all that were worthiest among the Protestants of north and south in the days of the Volunteers and the United Irishmen.  What interesting and pathetic portraits of Irishwomen are added to our roll at this period!  None is more tenderly mournful than that of Sarah Curran, the beloved of Robert Emmet.  The graceful prose of Washington Irving, the poignant verses of Moore, have enshrined the memory of her, weeping for him in the shadow of the scaffold, dying of heart-break at last in a far-off land.  No more need be said of her, for whom the pity of the whole world has been awakened by song allied to sweetest, saddest music.  What of Anne Devlin, Emmet’s faithful servant, helping in his preparations for insurrection, aiding his flight, shielding him in hiding, even when tortured, scourged, half-hanged by a brutal soldiery, with stern-shut lips refusing to utter a word to compromise her “Master Robert”?

What of the sister of Henry Joy McCracken, Mary, the friend and fellow-worker with the Belfast United Irishmen?  An independent, self-reliant business woman, she earned the money which she gave so liberally in the good cause, or to help the poor and distressed, through the whole period of a long life.  Some still living have seen Mary passing along the streets of Belfast, an aged woman, clad in sombre gown, to whom Catholic artisans raised their caps reverently, remembering how in ’98 she had walked hand in hand with her brother to the steps of the scaffold, and how, in 1803, she had aided Thomas Russell in his escape from the north after Emmet’s failure, had bribed his captors after arrest, provided for his defence, and preserved for futurity a record of his dying words.  Madden’s History of the United Irishmen, as far as it tells of the north, is mainly the record that she kept as a sacred trust in letters, papers, long-treasured memories of the men who fought and died to make Ireland a united nation.

And now a scene in America comes last to my mind.  Wolfe Tone, a political fugitive who has served Ireland well and come through danger to safety, is busy laying the foundations of a happy and prosperous future, with a beloved wife and sister and young children to brighten his home.  An estate near Princeton, New Jersey, has been all but bought, possibilities of a career in the new republic open before him, when a letter comes from Belfast, asking him to return to the post of danger, to undertake a mission to France for the sake of Ireland.  Let his own pen describe what happened:  “I handed the letter to my wife and sister and desired their opinion....  My wife especially, whose courage and whose zeal for my honor and interest were not in the least abated by all her past sufferings, supplicated me to let no consideration of her or our children stand for a moment in the way of my duty to our country, adding that she would answer for our family during my absence and that the same Providence which had so often, as it were, miraculously preserved us would not desert us now.”