This power of assimilation has never
decayed. There never was a nation, not even the United States, that so
subdued and re-fashioned those who came to her shores, that so wrought
them into her own blood and tissue. The Norman baron is transformed in a
few generations into an Irish chieftain, and as often as not into an
Irish "rebel." The Jacobite planter of the first decade of the
seventeenth century is in the fifth decade found in arms against
Cromwell; the Cromwellian settler is destined in turn to shed his blood
for James II. and Catholicity. Protestant colonists who, in the early
eighteenth century, enforce and defend the abominable Penal Laws, will
in 1782 demand, with drawn swords, that henceforth there shall be no
longer a Protestant colony but in its place an Irish nation. The
personal history of the captains of the Irish cause in modern times is
no less remarkable. O'Connell begins his public career in the Yeomanry
called out to put down the insurrectionary movement of Emmet. Isaac
Butt comes first into note as the orator of the Orange Party in Dublin.
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