[Speech at a great patriotic meeting held in the Free Trade Hall, Manchester, on March 17, 1915.]
Mr. Chairman:—If there is one thing more than another which I most value about this meeting it is its character. I have often, in the octave of St. Patrick, had to speak in Manchester, but I have on these occasions addressed myself only to the Irish people of Manchester, I am proud to know that the present meeting is one not of Irishmen alone; but of Englishmen as well—[cheers]—firmly united in a common purpose. [Cheers.] I am proud to think it is a meeting of the representatives of every political party which existed in this country before the war, and the mere assembling of such a meeting in this great English centre is a proof of the profound and ineradicable change which has come over the Irish question.
When this war is over, we will all of us, of all previous parties, go back to the consideration of political questions in a new political world. [Cheers.] Ireland has been admitted by the democracy of England, upon equal terms, to her proper place in an Empire in the building of which she had as much to do as England herself—[cheers]—and she has taken that place with perfect and absolute good faith and loyalty. In ordinary circumstances this St. Patrick's Day of 1915 would have been for us a day of triumph, of universal congratulation and jubilation. But alas! for Ireland, the mother of sorrows, we are met to-day in a moment of suffering and of deep tragedy. The moment for our jubilation is postponed. The shadow of war—ay, the shadow of death—hangs heavily over our people and our country, and our first and most immediate duty at this moment is not to give expression to triumph over our political successes, not to take part in jubilation or congratulation, but to do, every man and woman of us, what we can to see that Ireland bears her right and honourable part in the duty that is cast upon us. [Cheers.]
From the day of the declaration of war to this moment I
