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and swear to fight, or die, for the freedom of my native land, is a tyrant and a usurper, no matter in what char acter he comes to me, either sacred or profane. The men who dare to do such things, in the name of the Church, are the slanderers and misrepresenters of the Church. They are truly her worst enemies. Just look at the state of things in Ireland. A foreign power holds its iron heel on the country’s heart. For any man to declare himself openly the enemy of that power is to secure to himself a dungeon or a scaffold. “ But,” says Cardinal Cullen, “you must proclaim yourselves England’s enemies openly, or not at all. If you dare to conspire against her in private, to form a ‘ secret society,’ I will warn her of it in my pastorals, and she will soon settle with you. And worse than that, I will deny you the offices of the Church, and send you to eternal perdition.” Hero the issue must be met. And we must meet it now. For it is more than time that this horrible system of slavish blasphemy, bought and paid for by England, was trampled beneath our feet. The Church, it is true, condemns secret societies of a certain description. It condemns secret societies which are hostile to “ legitimate authority.” But is the author ity of England over Ireland legitimate ‘1 Show us the Irishman that dare say so, and we will show you a liar and a slave. Legitimate government—all government such as God and the Church approve—is instituted to promote the welfare of society, to protect life and property, and to secure the people’s happiness. Has the English Government done this in Ireland ? A Gov ernment of wholesale robbery. A Government that, in twenty-five years, has murdered more than a million of our people. Such a Government is the enemy of God and man ; and the first duty we owe to both is to sweep it to destruction. There is but one road, then, to Ireland’s independ ence, and that is a great, secret, sworn Organization, founded on principles as strict as the Masonic Brother hood; but with adaptations suited to our peculiar cir cumstances. It can be, and must be, made to embrace the truly intelligent and independent men of our race in every part of America, in the old land itself, in Eng land, Scotland, Australia, and all over the earth. By this means, and by this means alone, we can so influence and sway, uot only Irish, but American opinion in this country, as to hasten forward into our own time “ the irrepressible conflict ” between Republican liberty and monarchical tyranny. That will be freedom for Ire land, and no mistake. In the meantime, to have men and money and arms ready—efficiently ready—for the opportunity, will be the work of the Organization, and one which it must strain its every energy to perform. Will all true Irish nationalists in America, who ap prove of this movement, be good enough to communicate with each other without delay ? The sooner quiet, earnest, steady work is set about the better. And as money will be needed for necessary expenses, we would recommend all Circles to retain their cash in their own possession, or at least to see to it that their money is not used to continue disunion, or to promote movements which can only end disastrously. There are two things more against which we are anx ious to guard our brothers. One is an Organization which, though nominally sworn, is practically loose and inefficient, in point of secrecy. And the other, to allow incompetent or unauthorized men to sway such a power ful instrument, for any personal or unworthy purposes. We do not say this because we have any knowledge that such an Organization exists. For we have not. We simply point to the breakers ahead, and cry, “ beware.” Let everything be fully discussed, and firmly and finally determined. Then let us put on all our power to work the mighty machine until the object of its existence— the national freedom of Ireland—is finally attained. The Rights of Man. From the earliest days of history down to the present tyrants have denied the equality of men. The aggress ive race, whom chance or circumstances have placed above the weaker, or less combativo, has persisted in enslaving the latter, on the hypothesis of the superiority of the former over its less fortunate neighbors. Without enumerating the various nations conquered, and consequently degraded, from the days of the Israelites down to the English subjugation (so called) of Ireland, we come with one bound to the African race in these United States. "VVe find men, at this hour of the day, who have the feudal and barbaric effrontery to stand up in the light of the nineteenth century and deny the rights of the black man to liberty, even after half a million of freemen have written his enfranchise ment in crimson volumes. Now that the material iron that bound the material limbs of the black man has been struck away, and that the plantation is musical no more with the cries of suffering humanity, our superior white race, or that part of it which measures its own superiority by its power to oppress the colored race, is hardly willing to allow the black man to exist without being linked to any par ticular master. The ruffian whom nature has rendered “ superior” to the brute, by giving him a white skin, and setting him on his hind legs, is willing to allow the black man to exist in the community as a kind of pariah, but to give him any rights, or interest in the State, is not to be tolerated. There are a certain number of men in America who do not believe that the late war was fought, on one side for the preservation, and on the other for the destruction, of slavery. Yet, such is the fact, and when history points from the unborn years to this red page in the story of the Republic, the spirit of the dead will rise and cry, “ we died that slavery should perish.” What grander cause ever guided men to victory than the transformation of five millions of chattels into five mill ions of men ? And yet, what did the soldiers of the Union accomplish, if we refuse now to indorse their victory? Nothing! Until the liberated! slave has received his citizenship, and stands before the law the equal of his white brother, he is still but a slave, mocked with the semblance of freedom. The four years war is a bloody blotch, and the half a million graves are as molehills, the former unhallowed with liberty and the latter trodden down by the feet of tyrant serfs who are incapable of rising above the sink-pools of prejudice, whose rank womb has given them birth, and around whose purlieus they wallow like swine in the mire. What has been done for the slave whose chains have been riven, but whose rights to full citizenship have been denied ? Tie has been transferred from one taskmaster to many. lie has been turned over from the heartless slaver, whose mercy lay in his interest in the chattel, to an ignorant and prejudiced public, heartless as the slaver, and having no profitable interest in the slave. As a consequence, he is slave to a thousand brutal serfs, when he was slave before the war but to one gentleman master. How long shall the intelligence of the nation, the men who have an interest in every union grave, hesitate to throw open the doors of the Temple of Liberty to the black man, because men, with the virus of tyranny in their blood, howl against the rights of man ? Every day that passes, and sees the slave disenfranchised, is a day of victory to the hordes of despotism, and a day of disgrace in the annals of the Republic. Who refuse to acknowledge the equality of men before the law ? On what grounds do they base their refusal ? It makes us sick at heart to go into the sinks and slums of our cities, and hear men, wrho are wrapped in filth and hoary with vice, whom God has forsaken and humanity denied, foam with blasphemy at the idea of allowing their superior man the right which God has given him, because his skin may be darker hued than theirs. And why do these degraded beings deny the rights to the black man which they themselves enjoy? On the ground of his inferiority! It is the tyrant's plea, and as old as the world’s unholy history. We will not refer to the persons in the community who insult Heaveu by denying as divine origin to the black man as to the white. Such persons are only terrific examples themselves of how brutal man can become when he allows his baser passions full play. In our charity we believe such men give expression to such sentiments through a devilish desire to horrify mankind, and a bravado such as Satan displays when defying God from the infernal regions. Liberty, to be just, muat be universal. If it is to be ! doled out with qualifications, the qualifications must apply equally to all races. A man with a black skin is capable of enjoying blessings of liberty equally with his white brother, provided the intelligences are equal. If intelligence is to be the test, then the white man who lacks intelligence should be deprived of all participation in the enjoyments of liberty, as well as the black man, if justice be done. We are satisfied that all this cry of inferiority and “ brutal race” is but a lying excuse in the mouths of corrupt men to put a fair complexion on their prejudices. That the black man is not mentally the equal of the educated white man cannot be denied. How could he ? Slavery made intelligence a crime, and the alphabet was the tree of knowledge whose fruit yielded nothing but death to the slave. Other races have tasted of the same, and drank the cup of slavery to the dregs, and it ill becomes them now to dash the wine of life from the black man’s lips. From any stand-point the black man, when viewed by the unfilmed eye of reason, is entitled to all the rights of citizenship He was born here, and his father before him. That his predecessors were brought from Africa, and reduced to slavery, does not justify his exclusion from citizenship. Many white men were also brought across the sea, and fled from bondage to freedom; and for these same runaway slaves to deny the black man his rights in the country now is a criminal inconsistency and an inexcusable blunder. It is a blunder that has drawn upon our couutry the contempt of freemen, and as long as we continue clamoring for our own liberty, and with the same voice denying liberty to others, our country’s groans will fall unheard upon the ears of the world. Let us fling away this remnant of low prejudices, that is but the lees of the vices which England has poured into our souls. It is not in the nature of the Irish race to be ungenerous, and how some of our countrymen can persist in persecuting the fallen is an anomaly that has puzzled our friends and gratified our enemies. Why should we, who are but guests at the banquet of freedom, deny the black man a seat at the board, when the American host is willing to allow him that right ? “Nay, but, masters, the very dogs can pick up the crumbs that fall from the table,” and we are not willing that human beings shall eveu partake of the crumbs. Away with this blind bigotry, and let us act as becomes men, free and worthy of a free nation. The American people are willing to trust the black men with the ballot, and do we pretend to love liberty more than the Amer icans ? Or do we love America more than her children ? Now, see what a sorry figure we cut, with the marks of the gyves on our own limbs, and the gait and seeming of the bondsman still clinging to our forms, and rolling and rioting in liberty, are not willing to allow the poor negro the luxury of standing beneath the banner of the Republic, and looking up to God, to feel himself a man. Until his name is registered in the ark of free dom, the ballot-box, he is but a slave in our midst, and we are the masters who can lash and sell him, make laws and break them, and he cannot have a voice. That the day of universal liberty in America is at hand it requires no prophetic eye to see. God is true- • ing with lightning hand across the midnight sky the mighty decree that shall obliterate fraud and wrong, and though a million demons howl in its blinding glare, five million slaves shall blossom into men in its living light. Oh, that we could retrace the past, and correct the errors of our course as a people, in the great movement for the abolition of slavery. But God never rolls back the past. The present and future are ours. The black man is but half free. Let us help to render him wholly free by giving him the ballot. It is his right, and further, lie will have it, whether we say yea or nay. So, for once, let us take an advanced step on the road to liberty, rather than, like camp followers, come straggling up when the victory is won. Irish Saints and English Shams. The shamrock has taken root in London at last. It flourishes luxuriantly under the horses’ hooves and om nibus wheels of f’heapside. The “ green,” if not placed “ above the red/’ occupies a 'proud position by its side. The two, accompanied by “ Scotland’s bonnie blue,” are woven into a bit of tartan, to cover the puffy