Page:The World's Famous Orations Volume 6.djvu/184

THE WORLD'S FAMOUS ORATIONS upon the heart of the country, protested his solicitude to do justice to Ireland! What marvel is it, then, that gentlemen opposite should deal in such vehement protestations?

There is, however, one man of great abilities—not a member of this House, but whose talents and whose boldness have placed him in the topmost place in his party—who, disdaining all imposture, and thinking it the best course to appeal directly to the religious and national antipathies of the people of this country,—abandoning all reserve, and flinging off the slender veil by which his political associates affect to cover, altho they can not hide, their motives,—distinctly and audaciously tells the Irish people that they are not entitled to the same privileges as Englishmen; and pronounces them, in any particular which could enter his minute enumeration of the circumstances by which fellow citizenship is created, in race, identity and religion, to be aliens;—to be aliens in race, to be aliens in country, to be aliens in religion! Aliens! good God! was Arthur, Duke of Wellington, in the House of Lords,—and did he not start up and exclaim, "!"

The Duke of Wellington is not a man of an excitable temperament. His mind is of a cast too martial to be easily moved; but, notwithstanding his habitual inflexibility, I can not help thinking that, when he heard his Roman Catholic countrymen (for we are his countrymen) designated by a phrase as offensive as the abundant 174