Politics & Power Quote by Thomas F. Meagher

Meagher writes like a man trying to convert despair into enlistment. The first move is temporal jujitsu: “the glory of the old Irish nation” isn’t nostalgia for its own sake, it’s a recruiting tool. He frames Ireland as a body that can “grow young and strong again,” turning political rebellion into a kind of national regeneration. In the 1840s, with the Great Famine ripping through the country, talk of “glory” could easily sound obscene. Meagher uses it anyway because he’s not aiming for comfort; he’s aiming for velocity.

The conditional threat - “Should we fail, the country will not be worth more than it is now” - is deliberately brutal. It strips away the romantic fallback option of dignified suffering. Failure doesn’t just mean continued oppression; it means Ireland reduced to a hollowed-out place, demographically, economically, spiritually. He’s telling listeners they’re already living at the floor, so risk becomes rational.

Then comes the line that makes the argument stick: “The sword of famine is less sparing than the bayonet of the soldier.” He stages a grim cost-benefit analysis. A bayonet is terrifying, but it’s selective; famine is indifferent, mass, and slow. The subtext is almost accusatory: if you fear state violence enough to avoid revolt, you’re misreading the threat. In Meagher’s hands, famine becomes not only a catastrophe but a political indictment - evidence that empire can kill by neglect as efficiently as it kills by force. This is rhetoric forged in extremis: not subtle, but sharp enough to cut through paralysis.