to
Christendom from this enterprise--since the opportunity is so good
and the cause so just and weighty, and the undertaking so easily
completed."

The history of human freedom is written in letters of blood. It is the
law of God. No people who clutch to safety, who shun death are worthy
of freedom.

The dead who die for Ireland are the only live men in a free Ireland.
The rest are cattle. Freedom is kept alive in man's blood only by
shedding of that blood. It was not an act of a foreign Parliament they
were seeking, those splendid "scorners of death," the lads and young
men of Mayo, who awaited with a fearless joy the advance of the
English army fresh from the defeat of Humbert in 1798. Then, if ever,
Irishmen might have run from a victorious and pitiless enemy who,
having captured the French General and murdered in cold blood the
seven hundred Killala peasants who were with his colours, were now
come to Killala itself to wreak vengeance on the last stronghold of
Irish rebellion.

The ill-led and half armed peasants, the last Irishmen in Ireland
to stand the pitched fight for their country's freedom, went to
meet the army of England, as the Protestant Bishop, who saw them,
says:--"running upon death with as little appearance of reflection
or concern as if they were hastening to a show."

The late Queen Victoria, in one of her letters to her uncle, the King
of the Belgians, wrote thus of the abortive rising of fifty years
later in 1848:

"There are ample means of crushing the rebellion in Ireland, and I
think it is very likely to go off without any contest, which people
(and I think rightly) rather regret. The Irish should receive _a
good lesson or they will begin again_." (Page 223, Vol. II, Queen
Victoria's letters.) Her Majesty was profoundly right. Ireland needed
that lesson in 1848, as she needs it still more to-day. Had Irishmen
died in 1848 as they did in 1798 Ireland would be to-day fifty years
nearer to freedom. It is because a century has passed since Europe
saw Ireland willing to die that to-day Europe has forgotten that she
lives.

As I began this essay with a remark of Charles Lever on Germany so
shall end it here with a remark of Lever on his own country, Ireland.

In a letter to a friend in Dublin, he thus put the epitaph of Europe
on the grave of a generation who believed that "no human cause was
worth the shedding one drop of human blood."

"As to Ireland all foreign sympathy is over owing t