"There was formerly a fool in Kerry--a rare thing there. This fool having discovered a hen's nest, waited till the hen had quitted it, and then took the eggs and sucked them. After sucking the first, the chicken which had been in the shell began to cry out while descending the fool's throat. 'Ah, my boy, said he, 'you speak too late.' (Laughter.) My friends, I am not a fool; I know how to suck eggs. (Laughter.) Should England now be disposed to tell me that she is ready to do us justice, I would say to England as the Kerry fool said to the chicken: My darling, you speak too late. (Laughter and applause.)" {156} He then continued, in the most sublime and rapturous accents:-- "In the presence of my God, and with the most profound feeling of the responsibility attached to the solemn and arduous duties which you Irishmen have twice imposed on me, I accept them, relying not on my own strength, but on yours. The people of Clare know that the only basis of liberty is religion. They have triumphed because the voice raised in behalf of the country was first uttered in prayer to God. Songs of liberty are now heard throughout our green isle, their notes traverse the hills, they fill the valleys, they murmur with the waves of our rivers and streams, and respond in tones of thunder to the echoes of the mountains. Ireland is free!" One may readily conceive the magic of this speech. I borrow once more from the pen of M. de Cormenin. "Eloquence does not exercise all its power, its strong, sympathetic, moving power, except upon the people. Look at O'Connell, the grandest, perhaps the only orator of modern times. How his thundering voice towers over and rules the waves of the multitude! I am not an Irishman, I have never seen O'Connell; I believe I should not understand him. Why, then, am I moved by his discourses even when translated into a strange tongue, discolored, stunted, and deprived of the charm of voice and action more than with all I have ever heard in my own country? {157} It is because they are utterly unlike our jumbled, wordy rhetoric; because it is true passion that inspires him: passion which can and does say all that it has to say. It is, that he draws me from the shore, that he whirls with me, and drags me with him into his current. It is that he shudders, and I shudder; that he utters cries from the depths of his soul which ravish my soul; that he raises me on his wings and sustains me in the sacred transports of liberty. Under the influence of his sublime eloquence, I abhor, I detest with furious hatred, the tyrants of that unfortunate country, just as if I were O'Connell's fellow-citizen; and I seem to love green Ireland as much as my own native land." Here we have an orator who should be constantly studied by all those who wish to benefit the people.