God and nature are urging forward."

The character and services of O'Connell have never been fully appreciated
in this country. Engrossed in our own peculiar interests, and in the
plenitude of our self-esteem; believing that "we are the people, and that
wisdom will perish with us," that all patriotism and liberality of
feeling are confined to our own territory, we have not followed the
untitled Barrister of Derrynane Abbey, step by step, through the
development of one of the noblest experiments ever made for the cause
of liberty and the welfare of man.

The revolution which O'Connell has already partially effected in his
native land, and which, from the evident signs of cooperation in England
and Scotland, seems not far from its entire accomplishment, will form a
new era in the history of the civilized world. Heretofore the patriot
has relied more upon physical than moral means for the regeneration of
his country and its redemption from oppression. His revolutions, however
pure in principle, have ended in practical crime. The great truth was
yet to be learned that brute force is incompatible with a pure love of
freedom, inasmuch as it is in itself an odious species of tyranny--the
relic of an age of slavery and barbarism--the common argument of
despotism--a game

"which, were their subjects wise,
Kings would not play at."

But the revolution in which O'Connell is engaged, although directed
against the oppression of centuries, relies with just confidence upon the
united moral energies of the people: a moral victory of reason over
prejudice, of justice over oppression; the triumph of intellectual energy
where the brute appeal to arms had miserably failed; the vindication of
man's eternal rights, not by the sword fleshed in human hearts, but by
weapons tempered in the armory of Heaven with truth and mercy and love.

Nor is it a visionary idea, or the untried theory of an enthusiast, this
triumphant reliance upon moral and intellectual power for the reform of
political abuses, for the overthrowing of tyranny and the pulling down of
the strongholds of arbitrary power. The emancipation of the Catholic of
Great Britain from the thrall of a century, in 1829, prepared the way for
the bloodless triumph of English reform in 1832. The Catholic
Association was the germ of those political unions which compelled, by
their mighty yet peaceful influence, the King of England to yield
submissively