Wolfe Tone Quotes

I for one will never be accessory to subjecting my country to the control of France merely to get rid of England.

On my arrival here, Major Chester informed me that his orders from your Lordship, in consequence, as I presume, of the directions of Government, were that I should be put in irons. I take it for granted those orders were issued in ignorance of the rank I have the honour to hold in the armies of the French Republic... I do protest, in the most precise and strongest manner, against the indignity intended against the honour of the French army in my person; and I claim the rights and privileges of a prisoner of war, agreeably to my rank and situation in an army not less to be respected in all points than any other which exists in Europe. From the situation your Lordship holds under your Government, I must presume you have discretionary power to act according to circumstances, and I cannot for a moment doubt but what I have now explained to your Lordship will induce you to give immediate orders that the honour of the French army be respected in my person; and of course I shall suffer no coercion other than in common with the rest of my brave comrades whom the fortune of war has for the moment deprived of their Liberty.

The unnatural union between church and state which has degraded religion into an engine of policy will be dissolved. Tythes, the pest of agriculture, will be abolished, the memory of religious dissensions will be lost when no sect shall have an exclusive right to govern their fellow citizens. Each sect will maintain its own clergy, and no citizen will be disfranchised for worshipping God according to his conscience. To say all in one word, Ireland shall be independent. We shall be a nation, not a province; citizens, not slaves. Every man shall rank in the state according to his merit and his talents.

<small>WE HAVE NO NATIONAL GOVERNMENT</small>; we are ruled by Englishmen, and the servants of Englishmen, whose object is the interest of another country, whose instrument is corruption, and whose strength is the weakness of Ireland; and these men have the whole of the power and patronage of the country as means to seduce and subdue the honesty and the spirit of her representatives in the legislature. Such an extrinsic power, acting with uniform force in a direction too frequently opposite to the true line of our obvious interests, can be resisted with effect solely by unanimity, decision and spirit in the people; qualities which may be exerted most legally, constitutionally and efficaciously, by that great measure essential to the prosperity and freedom of Ireland, <small>AN EQUAL REPRESENTATION OF ALL THE PEOPLE IN PARLIAMENT.</small>

Unhappy victims of the most execrable despotism, you who groan in hideous dungeons, where at every moment you are plunged by the ferocious cruelty of your English tyrants, let hope once more revisit your hearts. Your chains shall be broken. Unfortunate inhabitants who have seen your houses, your property, wrapped in flames by your pitiless enemies, your losses shall be repaired. Rest in peace, gallant and unspotted spirits of Fitzgerald, of Crosbie, of Coigley, of Orr, of Harvey! Your blood, shed for the sacred cause of Liberty, shall cement the independence of Ireland; it circulates in the veins of all your countrymen, and the <small>UNITED REPUBLICANS</small> swear to punish your assassins.

I much fear the French government will have reason sorely to repent their extravagant caution with regard to infringing the liberty of the press; it is less dangerous for a government to be feared, or even hated, than despised, and I do not see how a government which suffers itself day after day without remission to be insulted in the most outrageous manner with the most perfect impunity can avoid in the long run falling into disrepute and contempt.

I am of opinion—and if ever I have the opportunity I will endeavour to reduce that opinion to practice—that the government of a republic, properly organized and freely and frequently chosen by the people, should be a strong government. It is the interest and the security of the people themselves, and the truest and best support of their liberty, that the government which they have chosen should not be insulted with impunity; it is the people themselves who are degraded and insulted in the persons of their government. I would therefore have strong and severe laws against libels and calomny.

I see the Orange boys are playing the Devil in Ireland. I have no doubt it is the work of the Government. Please God, if I get safe into that country, I will settle those gentlemen, and their instigators also, more especially.

What miserable slaves are the gentry of Ireland! The only accusation brought against the United Irishmen by their enemies is that they wish to break the connection with England, or in other words to establish the independence of their country, an object in which surely the men of property are most interested. Yet the very sound of independence seems to have terrified them out of all sense, spirit, or honesty. If they had one drop of Irish blood in their veins, one grain of true courage or genuine patriotism in their hearts, they should have been the first to support this great object; the people would have supported them. The English government would never have dared to attempt the measures they have since triumphantly pursued and continue to pursue; our revolution would have been accomplished without a shock, or perhaps one drop of blood spilled, which now will succeed, if it does succeed, only by all the calumities of a most furious and sanguinary contest, for the war in Ireland, whenever it takes place, will not be an ordinary one, the armies will regard each other not as soldiers but as deadly enemies.

[T]he Irish people are prepared and united, and want but the means to begin; that, not to speak of policy or the pleasure of revenge, in humbling to the dust a haughty and implacable rival, it is in itself a great and splendid act of justice worthy of the Republic to rescue a whole people from a slavery under which they have groaned for more than six hundred years; that it is for the glory of France, after emancipating Holland and receiving Belgium into her bosom, to establish one more free republic in Europe; that it is for her interest to cut off, as she now may do, one half of the resources of England and lay her under extreme difficulties in the employment of those which remain. For all these reasons, in the name of justice, of humanity, of liberty, of my own country, and of France, I supplicate the French Government to take into consideration the state of Ireland; and by granting her the powerful aid and protection of the Republic to enable her at once to demonstrate her gratitude, to vindicate her liberty, to humble her tyrant and to assume that independent station among the nations of the earth for which her soil, her productions and her position, her population and her spirit, have designed her.

I dread everything for him [Lord Edward Fitzgerald], and my only consolation is in speculations of revenge. If the blood of this brave young man be shed by the hands of his enemies, it is no ordinary vengeance that will content the people whenever the day of retribution arrives. I cannot express the rage I feel at my own helplessness at this moment, but what can I do! Let me if possible think no more; it sets me half mad.

<nowiki>[</nowiki>Charles de La Croix<nowiki>]</nowiki>...asked me did I know one Simon, a priest. I answered...that I had a strong objection to letting priests into the business at all; that I had the very worst opinion of them, and that in Ireland especially they were very bigotted and very ignorant, slaves to Rome and of course enemies to the French Revolution.

Our independence must be had at all hazards. If the men of property will not support us, they must fall; we can support ourselves by the aid of that numerous and respectable class of the community, the men of no property.

[T]hey and the Catholics had but one common interest and one common enemy; that the depression and slavery of Ireland was produced and perpetuated by the divisions existing between them; and that consequently to assert the independence of their country, and their own individual liberties it was necessary to forget all former feuds, to consolidate the entire strength of the whole nation, and form for the first time but one people.

Nothing could exceed the alarm, the terror and confusion which this most unexpected coalition produced in the breasts of the English Government and their partizans, the Protestant aristocracy of Ireland. Every art, every stratagem, was used to break the new alliance and revive the ancient animosities and feuds between the Dissenters and Catholics. Happily such abominable attempts proved fruitless. The leaders on both sides saw that they had but one common interest, as they had but one common country; that while they were mutually contending and ready to sacrifice each other, England profited of their folly to enslave both; and that it was only by a cordial union and affectionate co-operation that they could establish their common liberty and establish the independence of Ireland. They therefore resisted and overcame every effort to disunite them, and in this manner has a spirit of union and regard succeeded to 250 years of civil discord, a revolution in the political morality of the nation of the most extreme importance, and from which, under the powerful auspices of the French Republic, I hope and trust her independence and liberty will arise.