Those responsibilities involve
the guilt of national robbery and murder--of a system which arrays the
classes of our people against each other's prosperity and very lives,
like beasts of prey, or rather like famishing sailors on a wreck--of the
debasement and moral ruin of a people endowed by God with surpassing
resources for the attainment of human happiness and human dignity. I
cannot be loyal to a system of meanness, terror, and corruption,
although it usurp the title and assume the form of a 'government.' So
long as such a 'government' presumes to injure and insult me, and those
in whose prosperity I am involved, I must offer to it all the resistance
in my power. But if I despaired of successful resistance, I would
certainly remove myself from under such a 'government's' actual
authority; that I do not exile myself is a proof that I hope to witness
the overthrow, and assist in the overthrow, of the most abominable
tyranny the world now groans under--the British Imperial system. To gain
permission for the Irish people to care for their own lives, their own
happiness and dignity--to abolish the political conditions which compel
the classes of our people to hate and to murder each other, and which
compel the Irish people to hate the very name of the English--to end the
reign of fraud, perjury, corruption, and 'government' butchery, and to
make, law, order, and peace possible in Ireland, the _Irish Felon_ takes
its place amongst the combatants in the holy war now waging in this
island against foreign tyranny.
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