Page:The World's Famous Orations Volume 6.djvu/270

THE WORLD'S FAMOUS ORATIONS the English Parliament for Ireland, in spite of Irish protest, is sufficient to establish the facts that I have adduced. Martial law, suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act, suspension of trial by jury, suppression of free speech—these have been the permanent blessings conferred on Ireland by the destruction of the Irish Constitution. No single reform, large or small, has ever been obtained by purely constitutional methods. Let any Englishman who questions that answer this question: Let him point to any single act of justice or reform which has not been extorted in one way or another from the British Parliament by force or by fear. Catholic emancipation, falsely promised before the Union, granted, in the words of Wellington, to avoid civil war. The Church Act and the Land Act, produced by the influence of Fenianism. Allow me for a moment to turn to another aspect of our case. The suppression of the Constitution in Ireland has been followed by disasters unparalleled in the history of the world. Under English rule millions of our people have died by artificial famines, and hundreds of thousands of homes have been leveled by the crowbar brigade. People talk of the devastation in the Transvaal and Orange River Free State. Horrible, inhuman, and disgraceful as that was, it was as nothing compared to what happened in Ireland under the so-called constitutional rule of the English Parliament. The Transvaal, after all, was in a state of war. But in Ireland, in a 260