Muscatine weekly journal. [volume] (Muscatine, Iowa) 185?-1890, 1863-06-26

Gen. N1eaSher ON the War-HOV
Am Irish Soldier Speaks to the
Point.
We call the especial attention of Dan.
Harrigan, Mike Murphy and other anti-war
Irshmen of Muscatine to the sentiments of
the brave Gen. Meagher, himself an Irish
Democrat, delivered in speech given at
recent banquet in his honor at the Aston
House, New York. The report ofhis speech
below is copied from the Herald:
He knew of no war in which the Irish
soldier had been engaged anywhere outside
his own country that so positively ennobled
the exhibition of his bravery and other mill
tary qualities as did the present war, in
which the inheritance of l776 must either
irrevocably be engulphed, or, overlapping the
good, outlast it to the end of time. Hear,
hear, and loud cheers."l The authority of
Government founded on the free will and
votes of the people, disputed at the outset
before even that Government had an oppor-
tunity to vindicate or compromise itself; the
national property fraudulently surrendered
or seized; merchant ships waylaid by bucca-
neers and strewn in ashes on the seas; the
flag which had been the herald of plenty to
the land of famine, and had been hailed as
the prediction of disenthralled humanity
and renovated world-that flag outraged,
spat on, trailcd in the mire and rent by
PARTICLES. Hear, hear Such had been
the provocations to the present war, which
should be prosecuted until the instruction is
crushed and the national authority estab-
lished. Loud and long continued cheering. |
In the presence of all these facts, with the
ship-yards of our deadliest foe subsidized for
the destruction of the republic; with the
great swells of the instruction in conspiracy
with the crowned heads at Paris and London
to Mexicanize this continent; with the le-
gions of the South, invited and conducted
hither by the spies and traitors of the North,
laundering at our gates, what snivelling
hypocrite, what brazen knave, what paltry
bastard, what scurvy politician, asked the
speaker, calls for peace? War, indeed, is a
calamity of malignant fruitfulness. Terrible
in itself as the destroyer of human life, it is
the source of countless evils, which no pre-
cautions can anticipate, no discipline restrain,
no chivalry avert, and which, though she
may render them endurable, religion herself
can do but little TO asuage. But there is
something more grievous to people than
war; The loss of public virtue, with its train
of evils, far surpasses in it's destructiveness
those evils to which, even in its most lavish
riotousness, war gives birth. Better thou
saEd times that the taxes should be multi
piled, that trade should stand still, that COM
merce should be paralyzed, that multitudes
should perish on the fields, than that peo-
pie, for the sake of having reduced taxation,
of having glut of foreign importations,
should, at the bidding of craven or audacious
demagogues, clamor for peace which would
annihilate their sovereignty, closing their his
tory with the crime of suicide and an irrevo-
cable sentence of ineffable disgrace. Great
cheering.] Shall this be so !? Shall the pray
ers of the wicked prevail? Shall base con-
spiracy, with the hymn of the angels on its
lip and the craft of the serpent at its core,
prove superior to the laws, the army, the in
spiration of the land? [Cries of ''Never,
never."l Heaven forbid. Should that infamy
befall the nation, let not a statue or a COL
umn, in attestation of the founders of the
republic, stand to be the mockery of the
traitors who shall then hold sway. Against
peace so scandalous there is not survivor
of the Irish Brigade who will not protest.
In reprobation of such peace every soldier
of the Army Of the Mississippi-every soldier
East and West, under arms for the Union
will set his teeth and bring his bayonet to
the charge. Immense sensation.