‘Pardon me,’ said Emmet, ‘if I set you right; for history furnishes us with few instances of failure where a nation has been unanimous. It is giving the enemies of man a new weight, to add to the burden of oppression, by dignifying pigmy insurrections and partial rebellions with the name of open revolt. They should rather be called sanguinary riots, and thus reduced to their proper level: their ghosts might not be summoned from oblivious neglect to scare mankind from an assertion of their rights. Instances of national resuscitation are neither few nor unfrequent. Tyranny was expelled from Rome by the rebellion of the people; and Switzerland and the Netherlands are memorials of successful revolts. In our own day, America has shown us what a few thousand peasants could accomplish when actuated by a love of liberty. Ireland is superior in numbers to any of these, equals them in address and courage, and stimulated by wrongs greater than have been experienced by all these together. ‘Soldiers are but men, and generally the most imbecile of men. Let the people be taught to despise the glare and glitter of polished arms, and the terror they are wont to inspire will be converted into objects of ridicule and contempt.—Happily an opinion prevails in Ireland, that a soldier is an inferior mortal, and that three hundred athletic peasants would be equal to a regiment of a thousand men. I don’t say that this opinion is correct, but it must be admitted that, in case of a rising, it would be of infinite service, as tending to inspire confidence in the insurgents, and contempt for their enemies—two things that materially conduce to victory. ‘Leaders, in a harassing war, would be easily procured, for the sagacity of an unlettered peasant might serve for the purpose. Who does not remember the servant boy at Oulard, whose advice was followed by the destruction of a whole regiment?—Great occasions produce great men, and generals are formed in the study as well as in the camp. The Catholics are not what they formerly were,—intelligence is diffused, thousands of them are in the British army, and every man of these would desert on the first opportunity, for the _amor patriæ_ is not extinguished by the imposition of the military oath.’