“The next rebellion, whenever it shall happen, doth threaten more danger to the State than any heretofore, when the cities and walled towns were always faithful; (1) because they have the same bodies they ever had and therein they had and have advantage of us; (2) from infancy they have been and are exercised in the use of arms; (3) the realm by reason of the long peace was never so full of youths; (4) that they are better soldiers than heretofore their continental employment in wars abroad assures us, and they do conceive that their men are better than ours.”

And when that “next rebellion” came, the great uprising of the outraged race in 1641, what do we find?  Back from the continent sails the nephew of the great O’Neill, who had left Ireland a little boy in the flight of the Earls, and the dispossessed clansmen, robbed of all but their strength of body and heart, gathered to the summons of Owen Roe.

Again it was the same issue:  the courage and hardihood of the Irishman to set against the superior arms, equipment, and wealth of a united Britain.  Irish valor won the battle; a great state organization won the campaign.  England and Scotland combined to lay low a resurgent Ireland; and again the victory was not to the brave and skilled, but to the longer purse and the implacable mind.  Perhaps the most vivid testimony to these innate qualities of the Irishman is to be found in a typically Irish challenge issued in the course of this ten years’ war from 1641 to 1651.  The document has a lasting interest, for it displays not only the “better body” of the Irishman, but something of his better heart and chivalry of soul.

One Parsons, an English settler in Ireland, had written to a friend to say, among other things, that the head of a colonel of an Irish regiment then in the field against the English would not be allowed to stick long on its shoulders.  The letter was intercepted by the very regiment itself, and a captain in it, Felim O’Molloy, wrote back to Parsons: 

“I will doe this, if you please.  I will pick out 60 men and fight against 100 of your choise men, if you do but pitch your campe one mile out of your towne, and then, if you have the victory, you may threaten my colonel; otherwise do not reckon your chickens before they be hatched.”

It was this same spirit of daring, this innate belief in his own manhood, that for three hundred years made every Irishman the custodian of his country’s honor.

An Irish state had not been born; that battle had still to be fought; but the romantic effort to achieve it reveals ever an unstained record of personal courage.  Freedom has not come to Ireland; it has been “warred down and kept out of sight”; but it has been kept in the Irish heart, from Brian Boru to Robert Emmet, by a long tale of blood shed always in the same cause.  Freedom is kept alive in man’s blood only by the shedding of that blood.  It was this they were seeking, those splendid “scorners