After wellnigh eight centuries of cruelty and hate, peace seems now at last to be dawning upon Ireland. In a poem of servile flattery addressed in 1545 to Henry VIII by the antiquary Leland, are three Latin verses to celebrate an imagined final settlement of the Irish question. “Repentance has subdued the savage Irish everywhere routed, and has taught them to bear the sweet yoke of British law.” After the experience of some four further centuries of persistent attempt to force on the Irish the “yoke” —to their taste not sweet but bitter—of an alien people, we have at long last learnt that the only true and final peace between England and Ireland must be based on liberty and justice. Whether the present treaty be wholly in accordance with these is a political question I do not wish to raise. Only this is surely evident that it does offer such measure of both as will enable Ireland to enter with full self-respect a new and a better union with England, a union not of force and terror, but of free co-operation. That the dawn is overcast with the storm clouds of bitter opposition from irreconcilables should not make us despondent. For the storm clouds will pass over, and the dawn will brighten into daylight.

While we are thus watching the dawn with a hope not to be killed by passing anxieties, it seems opportune to remember one who at the very hour of sunset, when the shadows of the coming night were beginning to darken over his country, worked for that dawn whose rise we now witness.