Historical Papers: Part 3 from Volume VI of The Works of John Greenleaf WhittierWhittier, John Greenleaf
History
Historical Papers: Part 3 from Volume VI of The Works of John Greenleaf Whittier
Whittier, John Greenleaf
History
Let us trust that the prediction of O'Connell will be verified; that
reason and intellect are destined, under God, to do that for the nations
of the earth which the physical force of centuries and the red sacrifice
of a thousand battle-fields have failed to accomplish. Glorious beyond
all others will be the day when "nation shall no more rise up against
nation;" when, as a necessary consequence of the universal acknowledgment
of the rights of man, it shall no longer be in the power of an individual
to drag millions into strife, for the unholy gratification of personal
prejudice and passion. The reformed governments of Great Britain and
France, resting, as they do, upon a popular basis, are already tending to
this consummation, for the people have suffered too much from the warlike
ambition of their former masters not to have learned that the gains of
peaceful industry are better than the wages of human butchery.
Among the great names of Ireland--alike conspicuous, yet widely
dissimilar--stand Wellington and O'Connell. The one smote down the
modern Alexander upon Waterloo's field of death, but the page of his
reputation is dim with the tears of the widow and the orphan, and dark
with the stain of blood. The other, armed only with the weapons of truth
and reason, has triumphed over the oppression of centuries, and opened a
peaceful pathway to the Temple of Freedom, through which its Goddess may
be seen, no longer propitiated with human sacrifices, like some foul idol
of the East, but clothed in Christian attributes, and smiling in the
beauty of holiness upon the pure hearts and peaceful hands of its
votaries. The bloodless victories of the latter have all the sublimity
with none of the criminality which attaches itself to the triumphs of the
former. To thunder high truths in the deafened ear of nations, to rouse
the better spirit of the age, to soothe the malignant passions of.
assembled and maddened men, to throw open the temple doors of justice to
the abused, enslaved, and persecuted, to unravel the mysteries of guilt,
and hold up the workers of iniquity in the severe light of truth stripped
of their disguise and covered with the confusion of their own vileness,--
these are victories more glorious than any which have ever reddened the
earth with carnage:--
"They ask a spirit of more exalted pitch,
And courage tempered with a holier fire."
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