Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 1.djvu/290

 and advised" speaking on public interests with an exasperating defiance which made such speaking, at all hazards, a duty. I determined in such a crisis to reiterate, with unequivocal plainness, the ends we sought and the means we employed, and carried out my purpose in a long and deliberate article entitled the "Creed of the Nation" afterwards circulated as a Confederate tract. An unexpected consequence which it produced, makes it necessary to give some brief précis of it here:—

My opinions, I said, were misrepresented by Cabinet Ministers and official journals, and I was determined to set them out in terms which could not be mistaken. The Nation was a National, not a Jacobin, journal. To me liberty has still meant more light, more order, more justice. It typified a higher moral and social condition of existence. I should never consent to dwarf it down to the selfish scheme of a class in society, or the pedantic theory of a sect in politics. Revolution I regarded as inevitable—all the signs that foreboded it in history, all the wrongs that justify it, existed in Ireland at that moment.

I love peace, I fear disorder—I hate anarchy; but the sudden and violent remedy of an hour, though it pain us to the quick, is better than the perpetual helplessness of disease. If this is our only resource, let it come. It is just and well-timed; for of all nations that have arisen for their liberty, and achieved it among the plaudits of mankind, there is not one which suffered so deeply, or won the right of resistance by a patience more forbearing and protracted than our own.

But let it be understood that what the Irish people claimed, was just and eminently reasonable, and ought to be conceded without a physical conflict.

An Independent Parliament, elected by the widest possible suffrage, a Responsible Ministry, and a Viceroy of Irish birth, will content the country; and they will defend such a settlement against all aggression from without or from within. Such a Parliament would inevitably establish Tenant Right, abolish the Established Church, providing for existing interests, and endeavour to settle the claims of labour upon some solid and satisfactory basis. But one step further in the direction of revolution I do not believe it would go.