We shall, therefore, pass by the story of the destruction of our manufactures, of artificial famines, of the fomentation of uprisings, of a hundred Coercion Acts, culminating in the perpetual “Act of Repression” obtained by forgery, which graced Queen Victoria’s Jubilee Year in 1887.  In our island the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act, the repression of free speech, gibbetings, shootings, and bayonetings, are commonplace events.  The effects of forced emigration and famine American generosity has softened; and we do not seek a verdict on the general merits of a system which enjoys the commendation of no foreigner except Albert, Prince Consort, who declared that the Irish “were no more worthy of sympathy than the Poles.”

It is known to you how our population shrank to its present fallen state.  Grants of money for emigration, “especially of families,” were provided even by the Land Act of 1881.  Previous Poor Law Acts had stimulated this “remedy.”  So late as 1891 a “Congested District” Board was empowered to “aid emigration,” although millions of Irishmen had in the nineteenth century been evicted from their homes or driven abroad.

Seventy years ago our population stood at 8,000,000, and, in the normal ratio of increase, it should to-day amount to 16,000,000.  Instead, it has dwindled to 4,500,000; and it is from this residuum that our manhood between the ages of eighteen and fifty-one is to be delivered up in such measure as the strategists of the English War Cabinet may demand.

To-day, as in the days of George Washington, nearly half the American forces have been furnished from the descendants of our banished race.  If England could not, during your Revolution, regard that enrolment with satisfaction, might she not set something now to Ireland’s credit from the racial composition of your Army or Navy?  No other small nation has been so bereft by law of her children, but in vain for Ireland has the bread of exile been thrown upon the waters.

Yet, while Self-determination is refused, we are required by law to bleed to “make the world safe for democracy “—­in every country except our own.  Surely this cannot be the meaning of America’s message to mankind glowing from the pen of her illustrious President?

In the 750 years during which the stranger sway has blighted Ireland her people have never had occasion to welcome an unselfish or generous deed at the hands of their rulers.  Every so-called “concession” was but the loosening of a fetter.  Every benefit sprang from a manipulation of our own money by a foreign Treasury denying us an honest audit of accounts.  None was yielded as an act of grace.  All were the offspring of constraint, tumult, or political necessity.  Reason and arguments fell on deaf ears.  To England the Union has brought enhanced wealth, population, power, and importance; to Ireland increased taxation, stunted industries, swollen emigration, and callous officialism.