THE FUTURE OF THE YOUNG MEN OF IRELAND
From Irish Ideas by William O'Brien, 1893
Page 160
THE FUTURE OF THE YOUNG MEN OF IRELAND
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it shall be free as the ocean winds and amenable to no censuring eye, save that of Him who made a law for the winds and a way for the sounding storm.
True, nothing is perfected, we are only in the beginning of the daylight, we are listening to the singing of the morning stars. The machinery of the Land Acts is still clogged by a hundred faults and fetters. The Labourers Acts can be annulled wherever the blight of local landlord influence still prevails. Young men are still passing from the schools into the world, and the University educational equality, which the representative of Trinity College itself less than two months ago confessed to be inexorable and inevitable, has not yet shone upon their path. Enemies of the people are still seated in the high places, the emigration wharves are still busy, all the hosts of rank and wealth and domination are gathering for one supreme effort to crush the nascent liberties of our nation under the mailed heel. But it is written as the inalienable charter of our future that whatever is still defective can be amended, whatever we have won can never be taken back. Whereinsoever we may fall short in the future, it will be by failure of tenacity and mutual co-operation on our own part, by some of those little accesses of passion or over-eagerness which are perhaps inseparable from the first transports of freedom in every long-subjected land. But in the main and in the broad, the weapons by which we have won the recognition of Irish Nationality from the Imperial House of Commons are in the hands of the Irish people now and for evermore, untouchable by Coercion Acts, invulnerable to the shot or steel of armed legions; and by no process that is humanly calculable—not even permanently by any passing folly of our own—can the great reforms achieved within the last fifteen years fail to … continue reading »
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