The reformed governments of Great Britain and
France, resting, as they do, upon a popular basis, are already tending to
this consummation, for the people have suffered too much from the warlike
ambition of their former masters not to have learned that the gains of
peaceful industry are better than the wages of human butchery.
Among the great names of Ireland--alike conspicuous, yet widely
dissimilar--stand Wellington and O'Connell. The one smote down the
modern Alexander upon Waterloo's field of death, but the page of his
reputation is dim with the tears of the widow and the orphan, and dark
with the stain of blood. The other, armed only with the weapons of truth
and reason, has triumphed over the oppression of centuries, and opened a
peaceful pathway to the Temple of Freedom, through which its Goddess may
be seen, no longer propitiated with human sacrifices, like some foul idol
of the East, but clothed in Christian attributes, and smiling in the
beauty of holiness upon the pure hearts and peaceful hands of its
votaries.
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