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Let us trust that the prediction of O’Connell will be verified; that reason and intellect are destined, under God, to do that for the nations of the earth which the physical force of centuries and the red sacrifice of a thousand battle-fields have failed to accomplish. Glorious beyond all others will be the day when “nation shall no more rise up against nation;” when, as a necessary consequence of the universal acknowledgment of the rights of man, it shall no longer be in the power of an individual to drag millions into strife, for the unholy gratification of personal prejudice and passion. The reformed governments of Great Britain and France, resting, as they do, upon a popular basis, are already tending to this consummation, for the people have suffered too much from the warlike ambition of their former masters not to have learned that the gains of peaceful industry are better than the wages of human butchery.

Among the great names of Ireland–alike conspicuous, yet widely dissimilar–stand Wellington and O’Connell. The one smote down the modern Alexander upon Waterloo’s field of death, but the page of his reputation is dim with the tears of the widow and the orphan, and dark with the stain of blood. The other, armed only with the weapons of truth and reason, has triumphed over the oppression of centuries, and opened a peaceful pathway to the Temple of Freedom, through which its Goddess may be seen, no longer propitiated with human sacrifices, like some foul idol of the East, but clothed in Christian attributes, and smiling in the beauty of holiness upon the pure hearts and peaceful hands of its votaries. The bloodless victories of the latter have all the sublimity with none of the criminality which attaches itself to the triumphs of the former. To thunder high truths in the deafened ear of nations, to rouse the better spirit of the age, to soothe the malignant passions of. assembled and maddened men, to throw open the temple doors of justice to the abused, enslaved, and persecuted, to unravel the mysteries of guilt, and hold up the workers of iniquity in the severe light of truth stripped of their disguise and covered with the confusion of their own vileness,– these are victories more glorious than any which have ever reddened the earth with carnage:–

“They ask a spirit of more exalted pitch,
And courage tempered with a holier fire.”

Of the more recent efforts of O’Connell we need not speak, for no one can read the English periodicals and papers without perceiving that O’Connell is, at this moment, the leading politician, the master mind of the British empire. Attempts have been made to prejudice the American mind against him by a republication on this side of the water of the false and foul slanders of his Tory enemies, in reference to what is called the “O’Connell rent,” a sum placed annually in his hands by a grateful people, and which he has devoted scrupulously to the great object of Ireland’s political redemption. He has acquired no riches by his political efforts his heart and soul and mind and strength have been directed to his suffering country and the cause of universal freedom. For this he has deservedly a place in the heart and affections of every son of Ireland. One million of ransomed slaves in the British dependencies will teach their children to repeat the name of O’Connell with that of Wilberforce and Clarkson. And when the stain and caste of slavery shall have passed from our own country, he will be regarded as our friend and benefactor, whose faithful rebukes and warnings and eloquent appeals to our pride of character, borne to us across the Atlantic, touched the guilty sensitiveness of the national conscience, and through shame prepared the way for repentance.