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Its history is bright with the footprints of men whose very names still stir the hearts of freemen, the world over, like a trumpet peal. Say what we may of its fanaticism, laugh as we may at its extravagant enjoyment of newly-acquired religious and civil liberty, who shall now venture to deny that it was the golden age of England?
This kept him out most of the day, and he had not found occasion yet to report himself to the head of the lodge of the Eminent Order of Freemen. He was reminded of his omission, however, by a visit one evening from Mike Scanlan, the fellow member whom he had met in the train. Scanlan, the small, sharp-faced, nervous, black-eyed man, seemed glad to see him once more.
English landlordism, imposed from without upon the crofter of Skye or the rack-rented tenant of a Connemara hillside, has never crushed out the native feeling of a right to the soil, the native resistance to an alien system. The south-east, I assert, has been brutalised into acquiescent serfdom by a long course of feudalism; the west and north still retain the instincts of freemen.
We charge upon the American Constitution, that it contains provisions, and enjoins duties, which make it unlawful for freemen to take the oath of allegiance to it, because they are expressly designed to favor a slaveholding oligarchy, and consequently, to make one portion of the people a prey to another.
Our internal resources are great, and, if necessary, foreign assistance is undoubtedly attainable.... Fortified with these animating reflections, we... declare that... the arms we have been compelled by our enemies to as same, we will... employ for the preservation of our liberties, being with one mind resolved to die freemen rather than live as slaves.... We have not raised armies with ambitious designs of separating from Great Britain.... We shall lay them down when hostilities shall cease on the part of the aggressors.... With an humble confidence in the mercies of the supreme and impartial Judge and Ruler of the Universe, we... implore his divine goodness to protect us happily through this great conflict, to dispose our adversaries to reconciliation on reasonable terms, and thereby to relieve the empire from the calamities of civil war."
He advocated the admission of California as a free State, with no additions or compromises. No equilibrium between freedom and slavery was possible; if established to-day it would be destroyed to-morrow. The moral sentiment of the age would never permit the enforcement of a law requiring Northern freemen to return slaves to bondage.
It is nearly always in the power of a party politician to distort and misrepresent the act of an opponent, however just or blameless that act may be. Brougham made a great pother about the rights of freemen, usurpation, dictatorship. As a lawyer he raised the legal point, that Durham could not banish offenders from Canada to a colony over which he had no jurisdiction.
Then it was Master Adams took advantage of this weak point in His Excellency's remarks, to say that if he had the power to remove one, he could remove both regiments, and he added I can well fancy with what power 'A multitude, highly incensed, now awaits the result of this application. The voice of ten thousand freemen demands that both regiments be forthwith removed.
"The united armies of the world would hesitate to face the legions of contented freemen. Our power in the world will be increased more by a fleet of merchant ships than by squadrons of steel battleships. "We want a National Militia, to be composed of every able bodied man, who in the hours of peace prepares against the possibility of war.
If ever a borough deserved disfranchising, it was Liverpool on that election. The conduct of the freemen was atrocious. I speak of them as a body. The bribery on that occasion was so broad, barefaced, and unblushingly carried on, as to excite disgust in all thoughtful men's minds.
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