The Works of John Greenleaf Whittier, Volume VI. (Of VII): Old Portraits and Modern Sketches, Plus Personal Sketches and Tributes and Historical PapersWhittier, John Greenleaf
History
The Works of John Greenleaf Whittier, Volume VI. (Of VII): Old Portraits and Modern Sketches, Plus Personal Sketches and Tributes and Historical Papers
Whittier, John Greenleaf
Biography; History
But who is Daniel O'Connell? "A demagogue--a ruffian agitator!" say the
Tory journals of Great Britain, quaking meantime with awe and
apprehension before the tremendous moral and political power which he is
wielding,--a power at this instant mightier than that of any potentate of
Europe. "A blackguard"--a fellow who "obtains contraband admission into
European society"--a "malignant libeller"--a "plunderer of his country"--
a man whose "wind should be stopped," say the American slaveholders, and
their apologists, Clay, Stevenson, Hamilton, and the Philadelphia
Gazette, and the Democratic Whig Association.
But who is Daniel O'Connell? Ireland now does justice to him, the world
will do so hereafter. No individual of the present age has done more for
human liberty. His labors to effect the peaceable deliverance of his own
oppressed countrymen, and to open to the nations of Europe a new and
purer and holier pathway to freedom unstained with blood and unmoistened
by tears, and his mighty instrumentality in the abolition of British
colonial slavery, have left their impress upon the age. They will be
remembered and felt beneficially long after the miserable slanders of
Tory envy and malignity at home, and the clamors of slaveholders abroad,
detected in their guilt, and writhing in the gaze of Christendom, shall
have perished forever,--when the Clays and Calhouns, the Peels and
Wellingtons, the opponents of reform in Great Britain and the enemies of
slave emancipation in the United States, shall be numbered with those who
in all ages, to use the words of the eloquent Lamartine, have "sinned
against the Holy Ghost in opposing the improvement of things,--in an
egotistical and stupid attempt to draw back the moral and social world
which God and nature are urging forward."
The character and services of O'Connell have never been fully appreciated
in this country. Engrossed in our own peculiar interests, and in the
plenitude of our self-esteem; believing that "we are the people, and that
wisdom will perish with us," that all patriotism and liberality of
feeling are confined to our own territory, we have not followed the
untitled Barrister of Derrynane Abbey, step by step, through the
development of one of the noblest experiments ever made for the cause
of liberty and the welfare of man.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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