THE FUTURE OF THE YOUNG MEN OF IRELAND
From Irish Ideas by William O'Brien, 1893
Page 155
THE FUTURE OF THE YOUNG MEN OF IRELAND
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poverty and wretchedness and shame in the garrets or cellars of some swarming city. Even of those who in more benign days enjoy an honourable and sufficient livelihood, for the one Irishman who governs a State, or discovers an oil-well, or wins a silvern kingdom, how many thousands there be worn to the bone with the fever, hurry, and cruelty of the American struggle for life, grinding gloomily like so many pieces of machinery, trampling and being trampled in a pitiless material scramble for bread, wealth, notoriety, with the wholesome air of the Irish hills no longer invigorating their lungs, and the soft images once sacredly imprinted on their Irish hearts defaced, perhaps rubbed away, by the new faith, new interests, new appetites of a civilisation that sends the weaklings to the wall, and worships material strength as the decadent Romans worshipped the muscles of the prizefighters. An Irishman's natural place, after all, is in Ireland; and in Ireland, even in our own day, what had a young Irishman to look forward to but disability in the schools, decay in the towns, rent-raising or eviction in the fields, a life of dreary, ignoble, sodden failure, to close on the deck of an emigrant ship at the best, in the grip of a periodic famine, or of an apostate judge and hangman if he dared to dream of being free?
Why have I dwelt upon the discouragements which have hitherto depressed the energies and dwarfed the souls of the young men of Ireland? It is because these discouragements have in a great measure disappeared. In climbing a great mountain we are less apt to think of the Alpine heights we have overmastered than of the rugged ridge that still frowns between us and the top. The melancholy which centuries of all but unending defeat have bred in our Irish blood sometimes steals over Irish hearts in the hour of victory more readily than in the clash of a hopeless … continue reading »
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