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of the island.
Wherever an unlawful association existed, his great legal knowledge enabled him at once to detect its character, and, by urging its dissolution, to snatch its deluded members from the ready fangs of their enemies.
In his presence the Catholic and the Protestant shook hands together, and the wild Irish clansman forgot his feuds.
He taught the party in power, and who trembled at the dangers around them, that security and peace could only be obtained by justice and kindness.
He entreated his oppressed Catholic brethren to lay aside their weapons, and with pure hearts and naked hands to stand firmly together in the calm but determined energy of men, too humane for deeds of violence, yet too mighty for the patient endurance of wrong.
The spirit of the olden time was awakened, of the day when Flood thundered and Curran lightened; the light which shone for a moment in the darkness of Ireland's century of wrong burned upwards clearly and steadily from all its ancient altars.
Shoulder to shoulder gathered around him the patriot spirits of his nation,—men unbribed by the golden spoils of governmental patronage: Shiel with his ardent eloquence, O'Dwyer and Walsh, and Grattan and O'Connor, and Steel, the Protestant agitator, wearing around him the emblem of national reconciliation, of the reunion of Catholic and Protestant,–the sash of blended orange and green, soiled and defaced by his patriotic errands, stained with the smoke of cabins, and the night rains and rust of weapons, and the mountain mist, and the droppings of the wild woods
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