To that country I now offer as a pledge of
the love I bore her, and of the sincerity with which I thought and
spoke, and struggled for her freedom, the life of a young heart; and
with that life, the hopes, the honours, the endearments of a happy, a
prosperous, and honourable home. Proceed, then, my lords, with that
sentence which the law directs--I am prepared to hear it--I trust I
am prepared to meet its execution. I shall go, I think, with a light
heart before a higher tribunal--a tribunal where a Judge of infinite
goodness, as well as of infinite justice, will preside, and where, my
lords, many many of the judgments of this, world will be reversed."
There is little more for us to add. Meagher arrived with O'Brien,
O'Donoghue, and M'Manus in Van Dieman's Land in October, 1849, and
escaped to America in 1852. He started the _Irish News_ in New York,
which he enriched by personal recollections of the stirring scenes in
which he participated; but his career as a journalist closed abruptly
with the outbreak of the war of Secession, when he raised a Zouave
Company to join Corcoran's 69th Regiment, with which he fought gallantly
at Bull's Run. Every one remembers how the gallantry of the Irish
regiment in which Meagher served, saved the Federal forces from
annihilation on that field of disaster.
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