The voice is strong, deep, and soft; the delivery slow,
deliberate, the style of the English or American platform rather than of
the Irish gathering by the green hillside.
[Sidenote: Dartmoor.]
Altogether, never did there stand before this British assembly in all
its centuries of history, a figure more interesting, more picturesque,
more touching, above all, more eloquent of a mighty transformation--of a
great new birth and revolution in the history of two nations. Go back in
memory to the day, when with cropped hair--with the broad-arrowed coat,
the yellow stockings--this man dragged wearily the wheelbarrow in the
grim silences under the sinister skies of Dartmoor, with warders to
taunt, or insult, or browbeat the Irish felon-patriot--with the very
dregs and scum of our lowest social depths for companions and
colleagues--and then think of this same man standing up before the
supreme and august assembly where the might, sovereignty, power, and
omnipotence of this world-wide empire are centred, and holding it for
more than an hour and a half under a spell of rapt attention that almost
suggested the high-strung devotion of a religious service in place of a
raging political controversy--think of this contrast, and then bless the
day and the policy that have made possible such a transformation.
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