They say they are not going to liberate slaves. No; the object of the Washington government is to maintain their own Constitution and to act legally, as it permits and requires. No man is more in favor of peace than I am; no man has denounced war more than I have, probably, in this country; few men in their public life have suffered more obloquy--I had almost said, more indignity--in consequence of it. But I cannot for the life of me see, upon any of those principles upon which States are governed now,--I say nothing of the literal word of the New Testament,--I cannot see how the state of affairs in America, with regard to the United States government, could have been different from what it is at this moment. We had a Heptarchy in this country, and it was thought to be a good thing to get rid of it, and have a united nation. If the thirty-three or thirty-four States of the American Union can break off whenever they like, I can see nothing but disaster and confusion throughout the whole of that continent. I say that the war, be it successful or not, be it Christian or not, be it wise or not, is a war to sustain the government and to sustain the authority of a great nation; and that the people of England, if they are true to their own sympathies, to their own history, and to their own great act of 1834, to which reference has already been made, will have no sympathy with those who wish to build up a great empire on the perpetual bondage of millions of their fellow-men. FROM THE SPEECH ON THE STATE OF IRELAND (1866) I think I was told in 1849, as I stood in the burial ground at Skibbereen, that at least four hundred people who had died of famine were buried within the quarter of an acre of ground on which I was then looking. It is a country, too, from which there has been a greater emigration by sea within a given time than has been known at any time from any other country in the world. It is a country where there has been, for generations past, a general sense of wrong, out of which has grown a chronic state of insurrection; and at this very moment when I speak, the general safeguard of constitutional liberty is withdrawn, and we meet in this hall, and I speak here to-night, rather by the forbearance and permission of the Irish executive than under the protection of the common safeguards of the rights and liberties of the people of the United Kingdom.