“‘God prosper the cause!—oh! it cannot but thrive, While the pulse of one patriot heart is alive. How sainted by sorrow its martyrs have died! Far, far, from the footprint of coward or slave, The young spirit of freedom shall shelter their grave!’
“On you—fellow-countrymen—electors—at this moment devolves the good and holy task of protecting the graves of the sorrow-sainted martyrs of Ireland from the polluting tread of coward or of slave. None such will be found amongst you—none such will dare to show themselves if you be true.
“In this year of death, our country still survives! Weeping, fainting, bleeding, yet she lives; and lives to claim, aye, and to have—the services of her true children.
“Yes! although from him whose life’s devotion to Ireland was repaid by her confidence and her love, and from those without whose potent aid his labours had been vain—the beloved clergy of the people—down throughout all ranks and orders of the national organisation, Death has been busy, still enough remain of devoted, determined, patriot hearts, to carry out the good work he began, and to make it, with the blessing of a merciful God, speedily triumphant!
“Rally, then—rally, electors of Ireland—your country calls! Your dead brethren, even from their graves, invoke you. Drive from your hustings the men who shall have dared to think you cowards—who shall dare to ask you to continue slaves! And there are those who will so dare;—mark you not the exulting tone of Whig and Tory, and every other class of panderers to English passions and prejudices:—‘Repeal,’ they say, ‘is gone!’ ‘Ireland is at last subdued—she begs for bread, and is fearful to demand her rights lest we withhold our alms!’ It is false; how foully false you know, and at the elections you will prove. Deep as is the baseness of those who build their party hopes upon a nation’s misery, deeper still would be our baseness if ever, even amid all the heart-crushing calamities of the time, we shrunk in aught from our high purposes, and from our vows for Ireland’s regeneration.
“Nay, if but the hope of relief from our present distress were to animate us, even so should we cry out for that home parliament which alone can bring back wealth and abundance to the land—alone can guard her from recurring season after season of want, of pestilence, of death!
“Be ready then in time, fellow-countrymen, the elections are at hand; give us repealers—true and trusty repealers—men pledged to the safe, peaceful, constitutional principles you have been taught by him whom you followed so devotedly, and whom you mourn so affectionately and sincerely!
“On you—on each one and all of you together, and on none but you, the task now lies of helping Ireland at this fearful crisis of her fortunes. Yours, and yours alone, will be the glories of success, or the shame of not having sought it. Your distress has left the Repeal Association without funds to aid your contest, and we can do no more than to exhort and to advise. Let not the wily enemies of your freedom delude you. The duty is upon you; the means are in your hands, not in ours; if the duty be not done, poor Ireland will suffer the disastrous and ruinous consequences; but the blame of them, and the shame, will be upon you. Fellow-countrymen, this must not be—nay, this will not be. We answer for you. Unaided, undirected, as you are, you will bestir yourselves—on yourselves will depend, and you will achieve the victory. Meet in your committees; encourage the timid, cheer up the desponding; turn away with contempt from the whig or tory dependent, who would counsel you to dishonour, and vote for none but a staunch repealer—for one who will maintain the peace principles of the association, and aid it to work out and re-establish the inalienable and imperishable right of Ireland to legislate for herself.
“Had our own parliament ruled us, the landlords would not have had their tyrannies sanctioned and increased in license till the suffering people were reduced down to the lumper potato for a wretched, and, alas! a fatally precarious subsistence. Our manufactures would yet exist, giving comfort to our skilful artizans, and offering refuge to the peasant, unable to obtain a maintenance upon the land. In every village neighbourhood, the money raised by the hard toil of the labourer would be finding its way back, and briskly circulating there, by reason of the thousand sources of employment that would arise around the restored residence of the large proprietor. Irish money would thus stay at home to create and increase Irish wealth, and to support Irish poverty; and the grudging doles of an alien parliament would never more be needed in the land.
“Fellow-countrymen, for such results the association has been struggling—for such objects you are now called upon to work. By all that this wretched land has yet endured from English misrule,—by the accumulated and aggravated suffering of the last disastrous forty-seven years, with their fell climax in this year of death,—by the myriads of fresh graves, the fearful husbandry of death, that are ridging your fields and even your humble homesteads,—by the holy and most adorable name of the Deity, who chasteneth whom He loveth,—we entreat, we implore, we exhort, we adjure you to stand true to Ireland at these elections; to spurn Whig and Tory, and to prove yourselves worthy of your rights by returning none but those who will unflinchingly assert them;—and foremost amongst those rights, before all and above all, the right to make your own laws in your own parliament at home.”