They have conceived of nationality as a material thing whereas it is a spiritual thing.... Hence, the nation to them is not all holy, a thing inviolate and inviolable, a thing that a man dare not sell or dishonour on pain of eternal perdition. They have thought of nationality as a thing to be negotiated about as men negotiate about a tariff or about a trade route.... I make the contention that the national demand of Ireland is fixed and determined; that that demand has been made by every generation; that we of this generation receive it as a trust from our fathers; that we are bound by it; that we have not the right to alter it or to abate it by one jot or tittle; and that any undertaking made in the name of Ireland to accept in full satisfaction of Ireland's claim anything less than the generations of Ireland have stood for is null and void.... The man who in the name of Ireland accepts as a "final settlement" anything less by one fraction of an iota than separation from England will be repudiated by the new generation as surely as O'Connell was repudiated by the generation that came after him. The man who in return for the promise of a thing which is not merely less than separation but which denies separation and declares the Union perpetual, the man who in return for this declares peace between England and Ireland and sacrifices to England as a peace-holocaust the blood of 50,000 Irishmen is guilty of so immense an infidelity, so immense a crime against the Irish nation, that one can only say of him that it were better for that man (as it were certainly better for his country) that he had not been born." The pamphlet concludes with a historic retrospect of the Irish struggle for independence till the end of the seventeenth century, of the Anglo-Irish claim for independence in the eighteenth century, and with quotations from the five great Irish leaders since the last decade of that century joining in the same claim.