THE FUTURE OF THE YOUNG MEN OF IRELAND
From Irish Ideas by William O'Brien, 1893
Page 164
THE FUTURE OF THE YOUNG MEN OF IRELAND
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their enthusiasm that drives, their passion of love and hope and chivalry that makes the world go round in the enchanted radiance of the morning, before the shades of the prison-house begin to close and the illusions vanish, and the deepening shadows of the autumn evening chill the blood.
The young men of Ireland start now, not as the disinherited cast into the outward darkness, not as the slaves bowed with other men's burdens, but as the future citizens, rulers, and owners of their own delightsome land, with the inspiring thought that according to the measure of their own brain and muscle, their own sobriety and energy and devotion, will be the measure of this storied island's happiness, riches, and fame in the days to come. We may not look for a commerce with argosies upon every sea, nor for a Black Country hideous with blazing furnaces and mine-shafts—not, perhaps, an altogether unmixed misfortune for a race whose breath of life smells of the country green. But there is a wealth, a comfort, a field of enterprise and progress within the undoubted circuit of Ireland's natural capacities sufficient to keep young hearts glowing and young pulses joyously beating for generations to come. There is a soil which has never been suffered to yield one-third of its natural increase, a surrounding sea, rich with a trade worth millions of money, within sight of starving cottiers who cannot gather it; there are those natural native industries which the great towns of a thriving agricultural country would plenteously develop; there are our river Shannons and river Barrows to be made the waterways of smiling regions, instead of being their devastators; there are the hills to be again clothed with forests, the unspeakable city slums to be transformed into workmen's cottages where ' home ' … continue reading »
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