a special interest. One is the punishment of the rebels, and the other is the recognition of the rights of the colored people of the South. As far as I can judge, you take but little interest in all the other topics presented to you. In regard to the first, the punishment of rebels, you may as well content yourselves with the belief that not a single rebel is to be in any manner punished as a criminal. The most that can be expected is a provision like that now pending for an amendment of the Constitution. disqualifying certain persons from holding office, but beyond that the public expectation is to be disappointed. We have waited a year for the arraignment and trial of the leader of this great conspiracy; and apparently he is to-day no nearer a trial than he was a year since, although there is no legal obstacle whatever to his arraignment, trial, conviction, and sentence.

In regard to the other question, the rights of the men of the South who have been heretofore in slavery, there is more hope; and, for one, I believe that this government is never to be reconstructed until the full and equal rights of the colored people of the South are recognized as a governing force in the country. When I say that, I take into consideration all the incidents and the ultimate effect of that proposition. I do not expect merely a general declaration that the negro is to be equal to the white man before the law. That is an uncertain proposition. I do not know exactly what it means. I go further, and say that the negro is to exercise the highest privilege of the free man, the ballot; and I expect, as a necessary consequence of the

exercise of that privilege of a free man, that he is to be elected to office. There are those among us who would say that the negro is to enjoy equal privileges before the law. Others may say he shall exercise the elective franchise; but when we admit that he is to exercise the elective franchise, we must admit that he is to be eligible to office, and, if eligible to office, in the course of years he will be elected to office. Are you prepared for that? If you are not prepared for that result, you have not accepted the great principle on which this contest

rests.

The last time that I stood upon this platform was after the fall of Atlanta, in the early autumn of 1864. This hall was then thronged; and before me was an assemblage, as I learned afterwards, composed of an organization called the McClellan Club of this city. Enrolled in that organization, as I saw from the faces before me and inferred from the responses given, were large numbers of Irishmen. The majority of them were natives of Ireland. I do not see many of them here to-day; but at this moment, when, from private information and public rumor, it is understood and believed that the Irishmen are engaged in some attempt, the exact nature of which we do not comprehend, for the redemption. of their native land, I desire to make an observation to them. They never will succeed, they never ought to succeed, until they entertain more liberal views of the rights of men than they have manifested as citizens of this country. I think I have some right to make this observation, because in 1854 and 1855, when the entire sentiment of the State, or a vast pro

portion of the public sentiment of the State, was arrayed against them as a race and class, I took no part in the hostile movements. But I have not been an inattentive observer of passing events. They have hated despotism; but they have hated despotism, as I understand them, chiefly because they suffered from the despotic power of the tyrant, and not because they loved liberty. When the Irish people, and when our own people, have accepted the great truth, that it is not enough to hate the tyrant, but that it is necessary to love liberty for the sake of liberty, then we and they will have a just right to contend for liberty, and there will be good reason for believing in our success in the contests in which we are engaged.

I may as well in this connection make a further remark pertinent to Irishmen and to our own people also who entertain erroneous opinions concerning the negro. It is this: If I were to ask an Irishman why he left Ireland and came to this country, he could give but one answer. He would say that he left his native land on account of the oppression of England. The oppression of England has driven three million of Irishmen from Ireland to this continent. Many of them are in New England. They have come from a country vastly superior in all its natural resources to that in which they are dwelling. It has a better climate, a more fertile soil, vast mineral resources of every sort, water power sufficient to turn the entire machinery of Great Britain, fisheries, harbors, facilities for commerce, external and internal; and yet they have come from Ireland to New England,

cold, dreary, cheerless New England. Here is only a barren soil, an uninviting climate. What, then, is to happen hereafter? We have been told and told, by high authority in times past, that, if we emancipated the negroes, they would come North. The real fact was, that, after the war had developed a sentiment of liberty in the negroes, there was no way of keeping them in the South except to emancipate them.

The people must now look at this fact in another of its relations. If you do not do justice, or see that justice is done, to the negro where he is, and where he chooses to remain, he will come where you are. Inasmuch as the attractions of Ireland could not keep Irishmen there, on account of the oppression of Great Britain; so, if you permit the oppression of the negro in Tennessee or Virginia or North Carolina or South Carolina, he will come here. Now, my friend from Ireland, you who believe it is the worst of things that the negro should vote lest he should be your equal, I have this to say to you. If you think it more pernicious to your welfare that the negro should vote for Mayor and Aldermen in Charleston, S.C., than that he should come upon the wharves and streets in this city, and compete with you for that labor with which you maintain your families, take your choice, and deprive him of the right to vote in Charleston, and he will come here; but, if you give him his rights where he is, you will retain whatever rights and privileges you now enjoy. Of all the disgraceful facts which have marked the annals of nations during the last century, there is nothing more to be

reprobated, nothing which will be more severely and justly condemned by history, than the character and conduct of those of the Irish people who have come here to enjoy with us the liberties of this continent, and have allied themselves with the traitors and enemies of freedom, to some extent for the overthrow of the government and institutions of the country, and who now to-day lend willing aid to those who seek to deprive the negro of his just rights. While the redemption of Ireland from the oppression of Great Britain commends itself to the common sense and affections and sympathies of the people of this country, you of the Irish race can never expect to enlist our sympathies actively in your behalf, or engage our co-operation or secure our prayers, until you show yourselves, not the haters of tyranny merely, but the lovers of liberty as well,-ready to aid in securing for other men those rights which you seek for yourselves.

[At this point there was an interruption by a gentleman in the audience, who said, "I am an Irishman, and I am in favor of negro suffrage. I should like to ask if Irishmen have not fought bravely for the liberties of this country; if they have not been led on by brave men, Sheridan and Thomas Francis Meagher, and others, who, like themselves, were Irishmen."]

My young friend here says he is an Irishman, and in favor of negro suffrage. All the better for him. I have not complained of him, or of those who are like him, but of those of his countrymen who have here enjoyed those privileges which he