Page:The land league proposal.djvu/38

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are no longer a power to be despised or a nation willing to submit to continued insult and injustice. (Loud and prolonged cheers.) I would ask Englishmen to remember that there is not a single newspaper in England, or scarcely a public man representing English public feeling, that does not now admit that England's rule of Ireland has been unjust, illogical, and indefensible in the past. (Cheers.) What has convinced them of this? Movements like that which the Government is now desirous of suppressing—men who are now undergoing the same punishment and encountering the same calumny and abuse that were heaped upon Irish public men connected with former agitations. Time will again vindicate the course I am advocating here to-night, and show that the Land League leaders, who are now stigmatised in every possible language of abuse and misrepresentation, are advocating the true remedy for admitted wrongs, and pointing out the means by which that remedy can be applied, and which, if rejected, as other remedies have been rejected in the past, an English generation will yet live to mourn and deplore. (Loud cheering.)

I have now defined what I mean by "The Land for the people." I have endeavoured to point out how that can be accomplished without drawing upon the pockets of Englishmen, and with a certainty of ending the agrarian war in Ireland. (Hear, hear.) I have promulgated my full programme, and I have only to say that from this night forth, so long as I have life to devote to the cause of Ireland, that life shall be devoted to furthering this programme in the interests of my countrymen. (Applause.) I have only to ask from the' Irishmen and Irish ladies of Liverpool that sympathetic assistance and consideration which has already been extended to that movement which I had a hand in initiating. (Applause.) I cannot conclude my speech here this evening without tendering, as an Irishman and Land Leaguer, my thanks to the Irish ladies of Liverpool for their magnificent assistance to the people of Ireland during the recent crisis, and I cannot at the same time sit down without giving expression to my pride of living in an age when the women of Ireland, not only in Ireland, but in England and America, have been aroused to show that patriotism and courage which once characterised our countrywomen on the walls of Limerick. (Loud and prolonged cheering, the entire audience rising and waving their hats and handkerchiefs.)