ele, and John Mitchel had spoken, when Meagher rose
to address the assembly. The speech he delivered on that occasion, for
brilliancy and lyrical grandeur has never been surpassed. It won for him
a reception far transcending that of Shiel or O'Connell as an orator;
and it gave to him the title by which he was afterwards so often
referred to--"Meagher of the Sword." He commenced by expressing his
sense of gratitude, and his attachment to O'Connell, "My lord," he
said:--

"I am not ungrateful to the man who struck the fetters off my limbs
while I was yet a child, and by whose influence my father, the first
Catholic that did so for two hundred years, sat for the last two
years in the civic chair of my native city. But, my lord," he
continued, "the same God who gave to that great man the power to
strike down one odious ascendency in this country, and who enabled
him to institute in this land the laws of religious equality--the
same God gave to me a mind that is my own, a mind that has not been
mortgaged to the opinion of any man or set of men, a mind that I was
to use and not surrender."

Having thus vindicated freedom of opinion, the speaker went on to
disclaim for himself the opinion that the Association ought to deviate
from the strict path of legality. But he refused to accept the
resolutions; because he said "there are times when arms alone will
suffice, and when political ameliorations call for 'a drop of blood,'
and for many thousand drops of blood." Then breaking forth into a strain
of impassioned and dazzling oratory he proceeded:--

"The soldier is proof against an argument--but he is not proof
against a bullet. The man that will listen to reason--let him be
reasoned with. But it is the weaponed arm of the patriot that can
alone prevail against battalioned despotism.

"Then, my lord, I do not condemn the use of arms as immoral, nor do I
conceive it profane to say that the King of Heaven--the Lord of
Hosts! the God of Battles!--bestows his benediction upon those who
unsheath the sword in the hour of a nation's peril. From that evening
on which, in the valley of Bethulia, he nerved the arm of the Jewish
girl to smite the drunken tyrant in his tent, down to this our day,
in which he has blessed the insurgent chivalry of the Belgian priest,
His Almighty hand hath ever been stretched forth from His throne of
Light to consecrate the flag of freedom