sal a force larger than the three armies at
Waterloo. "I cannot," said Mr. Mitchell, "censure those who may have
believed, in the simplicity of their hearts, that he did mean to create
in the people a vague idea that they might, after all, have to fight for
their liberties. It is not easy to blame a man who confesses that he,
for his part, thought when Mr. O'Connell spoke of being ready to die for
his country, he meant to suggest the notion of war in some shape; that
when he spoke of 'a battle line,' he meant a line of battle and nothing
else."[105]

Tom Steele having addressed the meeting for some time, Mr. Thomas
Francis Meagher rose and delivered what was subsequently known as "the
sword speech," a name given to it on account of the following passage:
"I do not disclaim the use of arms as immoral, nor do I believe it is
the truth to say that the God of Heaven withholds his sanction from the
use of arms. From the day 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 the hour in which He blessed the insurgent chivalry of the Belgian
priests, His Almighty hand hath ever been stretched forth from His
throne of light, to consecrate the flag of freedom, to bless the
patriot's sword. Be it for the defence, or be it for the assertion of a
nation's liberty, I look upon the sword as a sacred weapon. And if it
has sometimes reddened the shroud of the oppressor; like the anointed
rod of the High Priest it has, at other times, blossomed into flowers to
deck the freeman's brow. Abhor the sword and stigmatize the sword? No;
for in the cragged passes of the Tyrol it cut in pieces the banner of
the Bavarian, and won an immortality for the peasant of Innspruck. Abhor
the sword and stigmatize the sword? No; for at its blow a giant nation
sprung up from the waters of the far Atlantic, and by its redeeming
magic the fettered colony became a daring free Republic. Abhor the
sword and stigmatize the sword? No; for it scourged the Dutch marauders
out of the fine old towns of Belgium back into their own phlegmatic
swamps, and knocked their flag, and laws, and sceptre, and bayonets into
the sluggish waters of the Scheldt. I learned that it was the right of a
nation to govern itself, not in this Hall, but upon the ramparts of
Antwerp. I learned the first article of a nation's creed upon those
ramparts, where freedom was justly estimated, and where the possession
of the pre