To win by peace they must use all the resources of peace, as they have done hitherto.
Is there any parish wherein there are no Repeal Wardens active every week in collecting money, distributing cards, tracts, and newspapers? Let that parish meet to-morrow or to-morrow week, appoint active Wardens, send up its subscriptions, and get down its cards, papers, and tracts, week after week, till the year goes round or till Repeal is carried.
Is there any town or district which has not a Temperance Band and Reading-room? If there be, let that town or district meet at once, and subscribe for instruments, music, and a teacher; let the members meet, and read, and discuss, and qualify themselves by union, study, and political information to act as citizens, whether their duty lead them to the public assembly, the hustings, or the hill-side. By acting thus, and not by listening for news about trials, the People have advanced from mouldering slaves into a threatening and united People; continuing to act thus, they will become a triumphant nation, spite of fortified barracks, Wellington, Peel, and England. They are in the right road; let them walk on in it.
FOREIGN POLICY AND FOREIGN INFORMATION.
Our history contains reasons for our extending the Foreign Policy of Ireland. This we tried to develop some months back.
The partial successes of the wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, from Hugh O'Neill to James the Second, were in no slight degree owing to the arms and auxiliary troops of Spain and France.
Our yet more complete triumphs in the political conflicts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries owed still more to our foreign connections—witness the influence of the American war on the creation of the Volunteers, the effect of the battle of Jemappes, and of the French Fraternity of Ulster on the Toleration Act of 1793, and how much the presence of American money, and the fear of French interference, hastened the Emancipation Act of 1829.
With reference to this last period, we may state that such an effect had the articles published in l'Etoile on Ireland that Canning wrote a remonstrance to M. de Villele, asking him "was it intended that the war of pens should bring on one of swords." The remonstrance was unavailing—the French sympathy for Ireland increased, and other offices than newspaper offices began to brush up their information on Ireland. But arms yielded to the gown, and the maps and statistics of Ireland never left the War Office of France.
But our own history is not the only advocate for a Foreign Policy for Ireland.