he was hanged, but it was rescued for holy uses.  The same night after the execution, a great crowd flocked about the gallows, and there spent the fore part of the night in heathenish howling, and performing many Popish ceremonies; and after midnight, being then Candlemas day, in the morning having their priests present in readiness, they had Mass after Mass till, daylight being come, they departed to their own houses.”  There was “sympathy with sedition” for you, gentlemen.  No wonder the crown official who tells the story—­same worthy predecessor of Mr. Harrison—­should be horrified at such a demonstration.  I will sadden you with no further illustrations of English law, but I think it will be admitted that after centuries of such law, one need not wonder if the people hold it in “hatred and contempt.”  With the opening of the seventeenth century, however, came a golden and glorious opportunity for ending that melancholy—­that terrible state of things.  In the reign of James I., English law, for the first time, extended to every corner of this kingdom.  The Irish came into the new order of things frankly and in good faith; and if wise counsels prevailed then amongst our rulers, oh, what a blessed ending there might have been to the bloody feud of centuries.  The Irish submitted to the Gaelic King, to whom had come in the English crown.  In their eyes he was of a friendly, nay of a kindred race.  He was of a line of Gaelic kings that had often befriended Ireland.  Submitting to him was not yielding to the brutal Tudor.  Yes, that was the hour, the blessed opportunity for laying the foundation of a real union between the three kingdoms; a union of equal national rights under the one crown.  This was what the Irish expected; and in this sense they in that hour accepted the new dynasty.  And it is remarkable that from that day to this, though England has seen bloody revolutions and violent changes of rulers, Ireland has ever held faithfully—­too faithfully—­to the sovereignty thus adopted.  But how were they received?  How were their expectations met?  By persecution, proscription, and wholesale plunder, even by that miserable Stuart.  His son came to the throne.  Disaffection broke out in England and Scotland.  Scottish Protestant Fenians, called “Covenanters,” took the field against him, because of the attempt to establish Episcopalian Protestantism as a state church.  By armed rebellion against their lawful king, I regret to say it, they won rights which now most largely tend to make Scotland contented and loyal.  I say it is to be regretted that those rights were thus won; for I say that even at best it is a good largely mixed with evil where rights are won by resorts of violence or revolution.  His concessions to the Calvanist Fenians in Scotland did not save Charles.  The English Fenians, under their Head Centre Cromwell, drove him from the throne and murdered him on a scaffold in London.  How did the Irish meanwhile act?  They stood true to their allegiance.  They took the field for