REV. DR. CAHILL'S ADDRESS, DELIVERED AT GLASGOW, AT THE ANNIVERSARY DINNER ON ST. PATRICK'S DAY. R. CHAIRMAN AND BELOVED FELLOW-COUNTRYMEN,-I do believe there is no nation in the world able to shout with the Irish. Our countryman, Dean Swift, counselled the Irish people, in his day, not to make speeches at public meetings, for fear of the Attorney General. "Do not speak," said he, "when you meet, as the law may punish you; but there is no law against shouting, hence, groan and shout." And from that day to this, we can groan and shout better than any people in the whole world. Till I came here on this evening, I thought I could never forgive either Lord J. Russell or Lord Palmerston; but the speakers who have preceded me have inflicted such a castigation on them, that, with your kind permission, I will forgive them, not in this world, — but in the next. For this purpose, I must have the key of the Kingdom of Heaven, and also the key of the other place, in order that, when I first let them out, I can next let them in. - Mr. Chairman, you have exaggerated my small services in reference to the public letters which I have written. Whatever merit I may have, consisted in my knowing well the history of Ireland. The history of other countries is learned from the cool pen of the historian, but that of Ireland is learned from the crimsoned tombs of the dead. The history of other nations is collected from the growing population and successful commerce, but the sad story of Ireland is gathered from the deserted village, the crowded poorhouse, and the mournful swelling canvas of the emigrant ship. You gave me too much credit for those slender productions of mine, and perhaps you are not aware that it was on the graves of the starved and shroudless victims of English misrule I stood when I indited the epistles. I dated them from the grave-pits of Sligo and the feversheds of Skibbereen. If I seemed to weep, it was because I followed to coffinless tombs tens of thousands of my poor, persecuted fellow-countrymen; and if my descriptions appeared tinged with red, it was because I dipped my pen in their fresh bleeding graves in order to give suitable coloring to the terrific page on which a cruel fate has traced the destinies of Ireland. It was not my mind but my bosom that dictated; it was not my pen but my heart that wrote the record. And where is the Irishman who would not feel an involuntary impulse of national pride in asserting the invincible genius of our own creed while he gazes on the crumbling walls of our ancient churches, which, even in their old age, lift their hoary heads as faithful witnesses of the past struggles of our faith, and still stand in their massive frame-work, resisting to the last the power of the despoiler, and scarcely yielding to the inevitable stroke of time? And where is the heart so cold, that would not pour forth a boiling torrent of national anger at seeing the children of forty generations consigned to a premature grave, or banished by cruel laws to seek amongst the strangers the protection they are refused at home? Nature does not deny a home to the untutored savage that wanders naked over her boundless domain; even the maternal genius of the inhospitable forest gives a welcome asylum to her young; she brings them forth from her bare womb, suckles them on her stormy bosom, and feeds them at her desert streams. She teaches them to kneel beneath the dark canopy with which she shrouds the majesty of her inaccessible rocks; she warns them to flee from danger in the moaning voice of the unchained tempests, and she clothes her kingdom in verdure and sunlight to cheer them in their trackless home. Well has the divine heart of Campbell given a preference to the savage beast over the ill-fated lot of the exiled Irishman, in these immortal lines which express the history of our nation: "Where is my cabin door fast by the wildwood, Where is my sire that wept for its fall? Where is the mother that watched o'er my childhood? |