Page:Great Speeches of the War.djvu/230

 have not made one single controversial political speech, and I have spoken in every province in Ireland to the greatest and most united and most enthusiastic meetings that I ever faced in the whole of my political experience. My one theme has been to impress upon Ireland the duty of taking a part to-day worthy of her history and her traditions. The one political hope I have ventured to express, and I express it again here with all the fervour of my soul, is that when the war is over the common dangers which all Irishmen of all creeds and all parties have faced together, the commingling of their blood upon the battle-field and their death side by side like brothers in a foreign land, may have the effect of utterly and completely and for ever obliterating the bitterness and divisions and hatreds of the past, so that the new Constitution we have won may be inaugurated in a country pacified by sacrifices and amongst a people united by the memory of common suffering. [Cheers.]

This is the first speech I have had the opportunity of making in Great Britain since the outbreak of the war, and I will confine myself to considering what the Irish race has done since the declaration of war. I am proud to make the boast that every section of Ireland has bravely and nobly done its duty. [Cheers.] I wish to draw no invidious distinctions between one section of my countrymen and another. You will remember the circumstances of Ireland are peculiar. For more than half a century the flower of her manhood has been fleeing from her shores to distant lands. No part of Ireland has suffered more than another. The emigration from Ulster has been, if anything, greater than the emigration from the other provinces. In the last sixty years over four millions of people have emigrated from Ireland. Since the year 1900 over half a million have emigrated, and two-thirds of the people who have gone have been young men of military age. I will not dwell on the sad political causes which ended in this emigration, but every man to-day must deplore the fact that for these reasons Ireland is not able to make a contribution in men towards this war such as she would have been able to make, if political and social and economic conditions had allowed her population even to remain stationary. Happily, for all of us, the drain of emigration has now been arrested. Last year, 1914, was the first year since the great famine, when the population of Ireland actually increased. [Cheers.] The emigration for last year was fifty per cent, less than it was the year before.