New Zealand Times. (PUBLISHED DAILY.) FRIDAY, AUGUST 6.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXX, Issue 4487, 6 August 1875, Page 2

New Zealand Times. (PUBLISHED DAILY.) FRIDAY, AUGUST 6.

Although, owing to the lateness of the hour at which the proceedings commenced and terminated, we are compelled to hold over our report of the dinner last night in honor of the Centenary of O’Connell, we do not think that a few remarks will be inappropriate on the day that, one hundred years ago, saw the birth of the great Irishman who is known throughout Britain and English speaking countries as “The Liberator.” Past animosities have buried themselves, the grievances of byegone days are forgotten, and above and beyond them all rises the memory of a man" whose country had great wrongs to right, who set himself steadfastly to redress those wrongs with every energy in his heart, but who in addition to this had a wide sympathy for liberty in its broadest and most worldwide sense, had a deep hatred of wrong wherever it existed. In a word, O’Connell, though his name must always be primarily associated with Irish patriotism, was one whose services in the cause of universal freedom were not limited by his devotion to the freedom of an oppressed nationality. Had there been no cause for which his country called upon him to devote his talents and his life, he would have been found that liberator, in a more extended sense, which oppression throughout the world has so often invoked, and so often found ready to her call, and it is in this latter character that his eulogy had best be written in the columns of a journal which exists in a land where the circumstances of O’Connell’s time are happily unknown, but where they probably might not have been unknown were it not for the exertions in past days of men like O’Connell. Whilst this is the case, however, we may, without trespassing upon any national feeling, point to the services to his country which O’Connell so freely and so fearlessly rendered. Few now live, perhaps, who can appreciate the weight of injustice and injury against which he had to contend. The broken cross by the wayside, and the red graves of their slaughtered forefathers, were but too near and too ready witnesses to the majority of Irishmen that they were but serfs on the land which had given them birth. Their hearths desecrated, and their homes betrayed, the religion which was to them synonymous with their patriotism placed in the penal ban of crimes, it is not difficult for us to imagine what men would have dared and done who suffered from such wrongs. Hothing is more simple than to preach forgiveness and forgetfulness in such cases, but is only easy for those to forgive who have nothing to forget—for those to forget who have nothing to forgive. These things, however, have passed away, and time is rapidly healing the injuries which centuries inflicted. That these times have passed away Irishmen have to thank O’Connell, as one amongst many who have striven for them, as a chief perhaps amongst those who spent their lives in the cause their best feelings urged them to advocate. As we have said, it is not altogether in this light that the memory of O’Connell claims the chief attention of a mixed community. It is as the friend of freedom in the abstract—as the man whose every pulse beat responsive to the demands of liberty beneath every sun and under every flag, in every state and every empire, that O’Connell claims in his grave the testimony which the living of many nations are now according to his memory.