Our complaint is made not against the crimes of his fathers, who are dead, but against the crimes of himself and his fellows, who are alive.

We denounce not the repealed Penal Laws but the unrepealed Act of Union.

If we recall to the memory of England the systematic baseness of the former, it is in order to remind her that she once thought them right, and now confesses that they were cruelly wrong.

We Irish are realists, and we hold the problems of the present as of more account than any agonies or tyrannies of the past.

But our realism has the human touch in it, and that constitutes the second impossibility in the invitation tendered us.