Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 1.djvu/291

 The Confederates desire a revolution, not of vengeance, but of restored rights, won by negotiation if possible, and if impossible, by the sword of the patriot, not the bludgeon of the assassin.

I maintain that such a settlement, made by negotiation between the two countries, would preserve all the existing rights that ought to be preserved, and would promise permanence, as far as any settlement could in such a stormy era of human affairs.

I would prefer it, I said, to a republic won by insurrection. I am deeply convinced a large majority of the Repealers of Ireland share this feeling. And why? Not from any unmanly abhorrence of war, which is noble and glorious waged for one's country, but because insurrection would plant deadly animosities between men of the same Irish race, and because the sudden transition of a people from Provincialism to Republicanism, passing through no intermediate stage, is an experiment for which we are not fit.

The condition of the country at the moment, I insisted, was desperate. Lying under the same sky as England, as fruitful in soil, and as fit for commerce, why was one a beggar and the other a millionaire? Was the cause any other than misgovernment, forced on us at the point of the bayonet?

A famine which fell upon Europe tested this system of foreign government to the core. Every state in Christendom, from the Great Powers to the pettiest dukedom in Italy and Germany, protected its people from starvation, for the rulers were of their own blood and race. Here the revenue of three years was squandered in one, in ignorant and audacious experiments, made in defiance of counsel and remonstrance from all classes of Irishmen.

The most destructive wars, the inhuman massacres whose memory appals mankind; the scourges of God, the plague and the cholera, never desolated a nation like this famine. Men fell dead daily in the streets and by the wayside, and were flung coffinless into the earth. Whole districts were swept bare as a desert of human life. Men fled from it into exile, dying in multitudes on the sea, or perishing in foreign countries, till a new plague sprung from the stench of their