The long history of oppression and injustice in Ireland has not only not extinguished the flame of Irish patriotism and feeling, but has served to kindle it, to make it more glowing to-day than ever before. For seven centuries Ireland has wrestled with and been subjected to misrule--to England's misrule: a rule great and noble in many things, as her priceless statesman says, but with this one dark, terrible stain upon an otherwise noble history. Only a day or two ago there reached our shores the last number of an English periodical, containing an article from the pen of that great statesman, to whom not only all Ireland, but all the civilized world is looking to-day to battle for freedom in England. The article presents, in the most striking form that I have ever seen, statements of what is properly called Ireland's demands. And I was struck there with the most extraordinary statement coming from this great statesman of England, of the character of England's rule, or rather England's misrule, of Ireland during those seven centuries. For all those centuries, he says, were centuries not only of subjection, but of extreme oppression. The fifth century was the century of confiscation; the sixth was a century of penal laws--penal laws, which, he says, "we cannot defend and which we must condemn and wash our hands of the whole proceedings"--a century of penal laws, except from 1778 to 1795, which he calls the golden age of Ireland. And as I stop for a moment to recollect what had distinguished that period, and as you stop here to-night and recollect for a single moment what had distinguished that short period of that century and made it the golden age of Ireland, you will understand why it was so called. It was the period when Henry Grattan, the great leader of the first battle for home rule, poured forth his learned and masterly eloquence; when Curran made his powerful plea for religious emancipation. The period when Robert Emmet--to whom such glorious tribute has been paid here to-night--was learning, in the bright early morn of that career which promised to be so great and to do so much, those lessons of patriotism which enabled him, when cut down in the flower of youth, to meet even his ignominious death with marvellous nerve and firm confidence, with courage and patriotism.