"Free nations, gentlemen, are not made by playing at insurrection.

If Ireland desires to be a nation, she must learn not merely to shout for liberty, but to fight for it" against a bigger nation with a standing army in which many Irishmen were enlisted.

The Irish are a sensitive as well as a generous race; and they feel taunts as much as more substantial wrongs.

When the first British statesman of his time, not a Roman Catholic, nor, as the Irish would have said, a Catholic at all, had denounced the upas, or poison, tree of Protestant ascendency, and had cut off its two principal branches, Froude wasted his breath in telling the American Irish, or the American people, that Gladstone did not know what he was talking about.

The Irish Church Act, the Irish Land Act, the release of the Fenians, appealed to them as honest measures of justice and conciliation.