your hands," he said, "in your power. If you do not save her, she cannot save herself." He was listened to with deep respect, and statesmen of all parties expressed their sympathy with him and the cause which he was so earnestly pleading. He had been ordered by his physicians to the Continent, and having a strong desire to visit Rome, and possibly to die there, he set out on his journey. Even his last wish was doomed to disappointment, for he had only reached Genoa when he died, May 15, 1847. His heart, at his own request, was sent to Rome, and his body rests in the cemetery of Glasnevin, near Dublin. In 1875 O'Connell's centenary was celebrated with the greatest enthusiasm throughout Ireland. ON CATHOLIC RIGHTS. From a Speech in the Irish House of Common, 1814. I wish to submit to the meeting a resolution calling on the different counties and cities in Ireland to petition for unqualified emancipation. It is a resolution which has been already and frequently adopted-when we had persevered in our petitions, even at periods when we despaired of success-and it becomes a pleasing duty to present them, now that the symptoms of the times seem so powerfully to promise an approaching relief. Indeed, as long as truth or justice could be supposed to influence man, as long as man was admitted to be under the control of reason, so long must it be prudent and wise to procure discussions on the sufferings and the rights of the people of Ireland. Truth proclaimed the treacherous iniquity which had deprived us of our chartered liberty; truth destroyed the flimsy pretext under which this iniquity is continued; truth exposed our merits and our sufferings; whilst reason and justice combined to demonstrate our right—the right of every human being to freedom of conscience-a right without which every honest man must feel that to him, individually, the protection of government is a mockery and the restriction of penal law a sacrilege. Truth, reason, and justice are our advocates, and even in England let me tell you that those powerful advocates have some authority. They are, it is true, more frequently resisted there than in most other countries, but yet they have some sway among the English at all times. Passion |