Or are you sure your strength will not be tested? The settlement you have made requires nothing to give it efficacy, except the assent or acquiescence of eight millions of people. Will they assent or acquiesce? Will Ireland at last perish like a lamb and let her blood sink in the ground, or will she turn as turns the baited lion? Your path of safety as well as of honour is now the public highway. No bye-way of your own will carry you through the perils that beset, and the greater perils that are before you."
In another letter he addressed himself to the people, and describing the means by which he believed they might secure their national rights, he did not advise insurrection in which they could not hold their own against the army of occupation.
"The only martial population Ireland possessed, the small farmers and farm labourers, would never wield a weapon in favour of Repeal. They were quite sick of what was called 'bloodless agitation,' which was not bloodless to them. To secure Repeal in the only form in which it could be carried, Independence, there was but one way to link it, like a railway carriage to an engine, to some other question strong enough to carry both itself and Repeal.
"But there was another class of means and mode of force which might be employed, he would call it Moral Insurrection, because its action would be defensive, not aggressive. It was based on the principle that every nation of men is owner of itself, and can never of right be bound to submit to be governed by another people, and that a nation was entitled to assert this principle by refusing obedience to usurped authority, and maintaining and defending such refusal. But how was it to shape its disobedience so that it might be successful? It must select one law for disobedience, because it was impossible successfully to refuse obedience to the entire code of the dominant country; this one law must be essential to Government, must form no part of the Moral Code, and must be easily resisted and hard to enforce. Could any such law be named in a country where there were no direct taxes? The one impost that could be refused he indicated as rent, and this was a contest for which an army would be found in the agricultural population. He entreated
