Page:The Irish Cause and "The Irish Convention".djvu/15

 down now—I pray you not to delude yourself on this point—if you break down now, you will not kill the Irish cause, but you will kill any reasonable chance for our time of reconstructing the Constitutional Movement upon an honest basis. You will kill all Irish belief in this House or in any Party in it. You will set up the right of Rebellion, whether for the Covenanters or the Sinn Feiners, as the only arbiter left in Irish affairs. You will justly make Parliamentary methods even more despised and detested than they are at the present moment by the young men of Ireland. You will force the Irish people, sorely against their will, to turn their eyes altogether away from this Parliament to the International Peace Congress. I daresay it will turn out to be an equally hopeless mirage, but at all events, you will have left the Irish people no alternative except to haunt your path at that Congress and to join all the other small nations of Europe in a final appeal for freedom to that supreme tribunal of European and American democracy and humanity. 15