But who is Daniel O'Connell? Ireland now does justice to him, the world
will do so hereafter. No individual of the present age has done more for
human liberty. His labors to effect the peaceable deliverance of his own
oppressed countrymen, and to open to the nations of Europe a new and
purer and holier pathway to freedom unstained with blood and unmoistened
by tears, and his mighty instrumentality in the abolition of British
colonial slavery, have left their impress upon the age. They will be
remembered and felt beneficially long after the miserable slanders of
Tory envy and malignity at home, and the clamors of slaveholders abroad,
detected in their guilt, and writhing in the gaze of Christendom, shall
have perished forever,--when the Clays and Calhouns, the Peels and
Wellingtons, the opponents of reform in Great Britain and the enemies of
slave emancipation in the United States, shall be numbered with those who
in all ages, to use the words of the eloquent Lamartine, have "sinned
against the Holy Ghost in opposing the improvement of things,--in an
egotistical and stupid attempt to draw back the moral and social world
which God and nature are urging forward.
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