of it.  But I cannot for the life of me see, upon any of those principles upon which States are governed now,—­I say nothing of the literal word of the New Testament,—­I cannot see how the state of affairs in America, with regard to the United States government, could have been different from what it is at this moment.  We had a Heptarchy in this country, and it was thought to be a good thing to get rid of it, and have a united nation.  If the thirty-three or thirty-four States of the American Union can break off whenever they like, I can see nothing but disaster and confusion throughout the whole of that continent.  I say that the war, be it successful or not, be it Christian or not, be it wise or not, is a war to sustain the government and to sustain the authority of a great nation; and that the people of England, if they are true to their own sympathies, to their own history, and to their own great act of 1834, to which reference has already been made, will have no sympathy with those who wish to build up a great empire on the perpetual bondage of millions of their fellow-men.

FROM THE SPEECH ON THE STATE OF IRELAND (1866)

I think I was told in 1849, as I stood in the burial ground at Skibbereen, that at least four hundred people who had died of famine were buried within the quarter of an acre of ground on which I was then looking.  It is a country, too, from which there has been a greater emigration by sea within a given time than has been known at any time from any other country in the world.  It is a country where there has been, for generations past, a general sense of wrong, out of which has grown a chronic state of insurrection; and at this very moment when I speak, the general safeguard of constitutional liberty is withdrawn, and we meet in this hall, and I speak here to-night, rather by the forbearance and permission of the Irish executive than under the protection of the common safeguards of the rights and liberties of the people of the United Kingdom.

I venture to say that this is a miserable and a humiliating picture to draw of this country.  Bear in mind that I am not speaking of Poland suffering under the conquest of Russia.  There is a gentleman, now a candidate for an Irish county, who is very great upon the wrongs of Poland; but I have found him always in the House of Commons taking sides with that great party which has systematically supported the wrongs of Ireland.  I am not speaking of Hungary, or of Venice as she was under the rule of Austria, or of the Greeks under the dominion of the Turk; but I am speaking of Ireland—­part of the United Kingdom—­part of that which boasts itself to be the most civilized and the most Christian nation in the world.  I took the liberty recently, at a meeting in Glasgow, to say that I believed it was impossible for a class to govern a great nation wisely and justly.  Now, in Ireland there has been a field in which all the principles of the Tory party have