the government themselves were engaged in violating, and the Nation was not the journal to brook the tyranny of the authorities.  With a spirit that cannot be too highly praised, it called for the overthrow of the government that had sent Mitchel in chains into banishment, and summoned the people of Ireland to prepare to assert their rights by the only means now left them—­the bullet and the pike.  And the eyes of men whose hearts were “weary waiting for the fray,” began to glisten as they read the burning words of poetry and prose in which the Nation preached the gospel of liberty.  It was to take its side by that journal, and to rival it in the boldness of its language and the spirit of its arguments, that the Irish Felon was established; and it executed its mission well.  “I do not love political agitation for its own sake,” exclaimed Martin, in his opening address in the first number.  “At best I regard it as a necessary evil; and if I were not convinced that my countrymen are determined on vindicating their rights, and that they really intend to free themselves, I would at once withdraw from the struggle and leave my native land for ever.  I could not live in Ireland and derive my means of life as a member of the Irish community, without feeling a citizen’s responsibilities in Irish public affairs.  Those responsibilities involve the guilt of national robbery and murder—­of a system which arrays the classes of our people against each other’s prosperity and very lives, like beasts of prey, or rather like famishing sailors on a wreck—­of the debasement and moral ruin of a people endowed by God with surpassing resources for the attainment of human happiness and human dignity.  I cannot be loyal to a system of meanness, terror, and corruption, although it usurp the title and assume the form of a ‘government.’  So long as such a ‘government’ presumes to injure and insult me, and those in whose prosperity I am involved, I must offer to it all the resistance in my power.  But if I despaired of successful resistance, I would certainly remove myself from under such a ‘government’s’ actual authority; that I do not exile myself is a proof that I hope to witness the overthrow, and assist in the overthrow, of the most abominable tyranny the world now groans under—­the British Imperial system.  To gain permission for the Irish people to care for their own lives, their own happiness and dignity—­to abolish the political conditions which compel the classes of our people to hate and to murder each other, and which compel the Irish people to hate the very name of the English—­to end the reign of fraud, perjury, corruption, and ‘government’ butchery, and to make, law, order, and peace possible in Ireland, the Irish Felon takes its place amongst the combatants in the holy war now waging in this island against foreign tyranny.  In conducting it my weapons shall be—­the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God!” Such “open and avowed treason”