Wolfe Tone Quotes

The English government has arrested the whole committee of United Irishmen for the province of Leinster, including almost every man I know and esteem in the city of Dublin... It is by far the most terrible blow which the cause of liberty in Ireland has yet sustained... Well, if our unfortunate country is doomed to sustain the unspeakable loss of so many brave and virtuous citizens, woe be to their tyrants if ever we reach our destination! I feel my mind growing every hour more and more savage. Measures appear to me now justified by necessity which six months ago I would have regarded with horror. There is now no medium. Government has drawn the sword and will not recede but to superior force—if ever that force arrives. But it does not signify threatening. Judge of my feelings as an individual, when Emmet and Russell are in prison, and in imminent peril of a violent and ignominious death. What revenge can satisfy me for the loss of the two men I most esteem on earth? Well, once more, it does not signify threatening. If they are sacrificed, and I ever arrive, as I hope to do, in Ireland, it will not go well with their enemies. This blow has completely deranged me—I can scarce write connectedly.

What will the French government do in the present crisis? After all, their aid appears to be indispensable, for the Irish have no means but numbers and courage—powerful and indispensable instruments, it is true, but which after all require arms and ammunition, and I fear they are but poorly provided with either. They have an army of at least 60,000 disciplined men to contend with, for, to their immortal disgrace and infamy, the militia and yeomanry of Ireland concur with the English tyrant to rivet their country's chains and their own; and, to my great mortification, I see some of my old friends in the number, Griffith and his yeomen, for example, in county Kildare, and Plunkett in the House of Commons. They may be sorry yet for this base prostitution of their character and talents. If ever the day of retribution arrives, as arrive I think it must, they will fall unpitied victims, and thousands of other parricides like them, to the just fury of the people, which it will be impossible to restrain.

In the present great era of reform, when unjust Governments are falling in every quarter of Europe; when religious persecution is compelled to abjure her tyranny over conscience; when the rights of men are ascertained in theory and that theory substantiated by practice; when antiquity can no longer defend absurd and oppressive forms against the common sense and common interests of mankind; when all government is acknowledged to originate from the people and to be so far only obligatory as it protects their rights and promotes their welfare: we think it our duty, as Irishmen, to come forward and state what we feel to be our heavy grievance and what we know to be its effectual remedy.

Looked over Paine's Age of reason, 2d part. Damned trash. His wit is without exception the very worst I ever saw. He is discontented with the human figure, which he seems to think is not well constructed for enjoyment. He lies like a dog... He seems to have some hopes that he shall enjoy immortality in the shape of a butterfly. ‘Say little foolish fluttering thing.’ Damn his nonsense! I wish he was a butterfly with all my soul. He has also discovered that a spider can hang from the ceiling by her web, and that a man cannot; and this is philosophy! I think Paine begins to dote.

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 have now done, my countrymen, and I do most earnestly beseech you, as Irishmen, as citizens, as husbands, as fathers, by everything most dear to you, to consider the sacred obligation that you are called upon to discharge, to emancipate your country from a foreign yoke, and to restore to liberty yourselves and your children;...remember that you have no alternative between liberty and independence, or slavery and submission; remember the wrongs you have sustained from England for six hundred years and the implacable hatred or still more insufferable contempt which even at this moment she feels for you; look to the nations of the earth emancipating themselves around you. If all this does not rouse you, then are you, indeed, what your enemies have long called you—<small>A BESOTTED PEOPLE!</small> You have now arms in your hands, turn them instantly on your tyrants; remember, if this great crisis escapes you, you are lost forever, and Ireland will go down to posterity branded with...infamy. ... Irishmen...you will embrace your liberty with transport, and for your chains, you will ‘break them on the heads of your oppressors’; you will shew for the honor of Ireland that you have both sensibility to feel and courage to resent and means to revenge your wrongs; one short, one glorious effort and your liberty is established, <small>NOW, OR NEVER; NOW AND FOR EVER!</small>

If such men lose, in the issue, their property, they are themselves alone to blame. By deserting the first and most sacred of duties, the duty to their country, they have incurred a wilful forfeiture; by disdaining to occupy the station they might have held among the people and which the people would have been glad to see them fill, they left a vacancy to be seized by those who had more courage, more sense and more honesty; and not only so, but by this base and interested desertion they furnished their enemies with every argument of justice, policy and interest to enforce the system of confiscation... The best that can be said in palliation of the conduct of the English party is that they are content to sacrifice the liberty and independence of their country to the pleasure of revenge and their own personal security. They see Ireland only in their rent rolls, their places, their patronage and their pensions.

Impressed as we are with a deep sense of the excellence of our Constitution, as it exists in theory, we rejoice that we are not, like our brothers in France, reduced to the hard necessity of tearing up inveterate abuse by the roots, even where utility was so intermixed as to admit of separation. Ours is an easier and a less unpleasing task; to remove with a steady and a temperate resolution the abuses which the lapse of many years, inattention and supineness in the great body of the people, and unremitting vigilance in their rulers to invade and plunder them of their rights, have suffered to overgrow and to deform that beautiful system of government so admirably suited to our situation, our habits and our wishes. We have not to innovate but to restore. The just prerogatives of our monarch we respect and will maintain. The constitutional powers of the peers of the realms we wish not to invade. We know that in the exercise of both, abuses have grown up; but we also know that those abuses will be at once corrected, so as never again to recur, by restoring to us the people what we for ourselves demand as our right, our due weight and influence in that estate which is our property, the representation of the people in parliament.

<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>

I humbly submit that England is the implacable, inveterate, irreconcilable enemy of the republic, which never can be in perfect security while that nation retains the dominion of the sea; that in consequence every possible effort should be made to humble her pride and to reduce her power; that it is in Ireland, and in Ireland only, that she is vulnerable—a fact of the truth of which the French Government cannot be too strongly impressed; that by establishing a free republic in Ireland they attach to France a grateful ally whose cordial assistance, in peace and war, she might command and who, from situation and produce, could most essentially serve her.

[I read an article] which mentions that Lord Edward Fitzgerald has been arrested in Thomas St., Dublin, after a most desperate resistance, in which himself, the magistrate (one Swan) and Capt[ai]n Ryan, who commanded the guard, were severely wounded. I cannot describe the effect this intelligence had on me; it brought on almost immediately a spasm in my stomach which confined me the whole day. I knew Fitzgerald but very little, but I honor and venerate his character, which he has uniformly sustained and, in this last instance, illustrated. What miserable wretches are the gentry of Ireland beside him! I would rather be Fitzgerald as he is at this moment, wounded, in his dungeon, than Pitt at the head of the British empire. What a noble fellow!

Alarming as the state of Ireland really and truly is to the English government, I have no doubt on my mind that it is their present policy to exaggerate the danger as much as possible in order to terrify the Irish gentry out of their wits, and, under cover of this universal panic, to crush the spirit of the people and reduce the country to a state of slavery more deplorable than that of any former period of our unfortunate history.

[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.

On him who is not convinced by the arguments of Payne, the absurdity of hereditary monarchs and hereditary legislatures where no man would admit of hereditary cob[b]lers who wished to have his shoes well mended, I despair of making any impression.

[I]t is our principle that if a nation wills a bad government it ought to have that government. We have no power, and we have no right, to force men to be free.