THE FUTURE OF THE YOUNG MEN OF IRELAND
From Irish Ideas by William O'Brien, 1893
Page 158
THE FUTURE OF THE YOUNG MEN OF IRELAND
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arms there were none; the might of an overwhelming power encompassed us; and they who with splendid rashness cast youth and friends and hope into the desperate hazard, lived not to hear the trumpets sound on a green hillside, but to pass through the dock of a Special Commission Court to a penal grave, leaving behind them promoted lawyers, broken-hearted mothers, wives, and sweethearts, and a country soul-sick and benumbed and broken. If an Irish Nationalist had fallen asleep in 1867, and could waken from his slumber in this year of grace, he would marvel whether the Nationalist majority in Parliament, the Nationalist mayors, the revolutionised Poor-law Boards, the Land Purchase Acts and Labourers Acts, the fallen oligarchy, the friendly police, the Home Rule House of Commons, were not all in a conspiracy to mock him with impossible joys. He would listen to men's converse, and he would find not that they were astounded that the House of Commons should by two hundred several votes reiterate their determination to establish an Irish Parliament, but that the House of Lords should have plucked up courage even for one brief hour in a nation's life to defer the opening ceremony in College Green. He would bethink him of O'Connell, with all his colossal intellect, wearing himself to death in the Repeal struggle without waking an echo in the sympathies of a single British statesman, or breaking even by a handbreadth the adamantine wall of British prejudice; and he would ask himself, 'What meaneth all this dazing talk of a Cabinet of Home Rulers, of a Parliamentary majority discontented only that the Home Rule Bill is not more drastic, of great English newspapers interpenetrated with the doctrines of Davis, and English multitudes vast as the sands of the sea with whom an ex-Fenian convict, Michael Davitt, is an … continue reading »
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