English Government Quotes

Dearest Madam: We your servants join together and thoughts it better to write you a nice loving letter which will tell you about all our wishes. We wish to have your laws in our towns … Plenty wars here in our country. Plenty murder and plenty idol worshippers …. We have spoken to the English consul plenty times about having an English government here. We never have an answer from you, so we wish to write you ourselves.

That million and a half of men, women, and children were carefully, prudently, and peacefully slain by the English Government. They died of hunger in the midst of abundance which their own hands created; and it is quite immaterial to distinguish those who perished in the agonies of famine itself from those who died by typhus fever, which in Ireland is always caused by famine. Further, this was strictly an artificial famine-that is to say, it was a famine which desolated a rich and fertile island that produced every year abundance and superabundance to sustain all her people and many more. The English, indeed, call that famine a dispensation of Providence, and ascribe it entirely to the blight of the potatoes. But potatoes failed in like manner all over Europe, yet there was no famine save in Ireland. The British account of the matter, then, is first a fraud; second, a blasphemy. The Almighty, indeed, sent the potato blight, but the English created the famine.

They had themselves suffered little, if at all, from the English government. Under it, they had prospered and multiplied. It required of this part of people great intrepidity, wisdom, and generosity to join their cause men already stigmatized as rebels.

I cannot see anything but disaster in delaying to let the natives know that if the English government is non—aggressive it is so from a sense of justice, and from no want of power.

My execution, and the execution of my gallows companions, will be of use to you. May they show you what you can expect of the English government.

Herein indeed consists the excellence of the English government, that all parts of it form a mutual check upon each other.

There is a nation of the Irish, the whilst, that wander abroad, most of them criminous, ail-lewdly affected people that, forth of an unjust yet habitual hatred to the English Government, delight to have it believed, and themselves pitied as persecuted forth of the country, and ravished of their means for their religion only, stirring and inciting all they can to blood and rebellion

As for the much discussed Irish university, I do not myself believe it will be founded. Should even an English Government be blind enough to allow it, an Irish university could only become a hot-bed of treason, and practically all educated members of the Roman Catholic community would avoid sending their sons to such a seminary of sedition, where the influence would be insidiously directed to make the undergraduates even more hostile to England than they already are by inherited instincts and by all they have been told in their own homes.