Ridgeway. Scian Dubh
on their own shores. Under this horrible pressure, thousands of them necessarily gave way and fell victims to those gaunt recruiting sergeants of the government—Hunger and Rags. Unable to earn wherewithal to keep body and soul together at their own doors, or within their own borders, and perceiving that the commerce, the manufactures and all the native resource of their country were crushed to the earth, beneath the relentless heel of the oppressor, they fell into the pit-fall dug for them by an accursed perjurer and traitor, and, in obedience to the first law of nature, assumed her livery, and swore allegiance to her flag. But think you that either God or man attaches the slightest importance to an oath exacted under such circumstances? Here am I, Nick Barry, now in the service of the usurper, and driven into it with tears in my eyes and rebellion in my heart, and do you suppose that I regard my oath as other than an additional incentive to plot the downfall of the infamous tyrant and robber who hounded me into swallowing it, and who, to-day, keeps the girl I love out of her mother’s property, that, on a mere technicality, was laid hold of, and thrown into chancery, by a villainous and traitorous relative, long in the secret service of the government at home, when he found the poor, young thing an orphan, and without a wealthy friend in the world to back her, and that too, upon a claim that hadn’t a leg to stand upon, as everybody knew? My soldier-life, and his continued absence in England, prevented my meeting the villain before he died; but as he has left the suit to his son, who, I learn, is no better than he was himself, and is also a great hanger on about the Castle of Dublin, I am in hopes of one day or other meeting this same gentleman, who purports to represent the old villain in this case, when, no matter how the chancery suit may go, I shall hold him to a severe reckoning for the injustice and hardships to which she has been so long subjected through their joint instrumentality. But why should she complain any more than Tom there, whose father’s side of the house, once powerful and wealthy, in the west of Ireland, have been all but beggared through the same infamous government, and their accursed agents, who had plundered them of every acre they possessed, and exiled the bravest and best of them to these distant shores?”
These few observations were made with an earnestness and vehemence that showed how fierce and hostile the blood that boiled in the veins of the speaker. Nor was there any appeal from the inexorable logic of his remarks. From the inhuman manner in which England has, for seven centuries preyed upon the vitals of Ireland, and plundered and expatriated her children, the latter are morally absolved from all allegiance or fidelity to her, no matter what the circumstances of their plighted faith. No man should be bound by oaths or obligations, to maintain the supremacy or defend the interests of a tyrant, exacted under an inhuman pressure or in the presence of such an alternative as the poor Irish recruit is subject to, namely, that of enlisting or starving. How can any Irish soldier, possessed of a single spark of pride or patriotism, and wearing the queen of England’s livery to-day, be other than the deadly enemy of the representative of a people who have laid his country waste, murdered his kindred and left him and millions of his race without a roof to cover them on their own native shores? How can he gaze with any degree of enthusiasm or pleasure upon the blood-stained rag that waved over Mullaghmast, that was perjured at Limerick, and that endorsed with its baleful glare all the demoniacal atrocities of the Penal Laws? “Resistance to tyrants is obedience to God”—therefore the children of Ireland who have been so long trodden in the dust under the feet of an usurper, are but obeying the dictates of heaven and of humanity, when, by every means within the boundaries of civilization, they endeavor to encompass not only their own redemption from the bonds of the oppressor, but the total destruction of his power in every connection. Ireland owes no allegiance to England. For seven hundred years she has been crying out against the colony of foreign bayonets that have kept her in bondage and reduced her to beggary. For one single hour, throughout the whole of that long period, she has never voluntarily accepted the condition of her thraldom, or bowed submissively beneath the British yoke. She therefore cannot be regarded in the light of a conquered nation, but must be looked upon as still engaged in the deadly and mortal contest, whose first field was fought long years ago, between the Anglo-Norman freebooters and the Fenians of Cuan-na-Groith, or the Harbor of the Sun, when Strongbow, at the instance of the second Henry, made an unprovoked descent upon her shores.
“Yes,” replied Tom, when Barry had finished, “both I and mine have felt the cruel fangs of the despoiler; but, sure, where is the use of singlin out ourselves, when the whole of the thrue native Irish—which manes the nineteenth twintieths of the kingdoms-are jist as badly off. The quarrel is not yours nor mine, nor the grievances naither. Both belong to every man, woman and child possessed of a pure dhrop of Irish blood in their veins; for all have suffered alike, as far as that is consarned. And, now, all that has to be done on the head of it, is jist to wait the nick of time that we are all expectin, and then, with one well directed and united blow, dash the tyrant to the ground on this side of the Atlantic, and thrust to Providence, the sympathy of the great American people and our own sthrong arms and hearts for the rest.”
“Quebec and the fort beyond there,” observed Burk, “may give us some trouble; but further than this, from what has been ascertained of the Province generally, there is little to be apprehended. The intimate business relations and the intermarriages between the Canadians and the people of the United States, will exercise a most powerful influence in the case, while the manner in which both the English and Canadian Governments fomented the recent civil war on the other side of the lines, cannot fail to have embittered the American people against the British Flag, wherever it is to be found. The treacherous attack of England upon the existance of the Republic, in subsidizing the South with arms and money, and in destroying, as she did for a considerable period, the American carrying trade, through the instrumentality of pirates built and fitted out in her own ship-yards and docks, will now afford the American government an opportunity of paying her off in kind, through permitting Fenianism to pursue its course without interruption, until the Provinces become part and parcel of the Union, when they have served as a basis of operation for the purpose of fitting out expeditions against the arch enemy of Ireland and of human freedom, and contributed to the final redemption of that oppressed country from the bonds in which it has so long lain. Surely, what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander; and if England, through the House of Commons, cheered the Alabama when her destructive qualities were described before that body by Mr. Laird, and, after having built the pirate, sent her out to make war upon the North when it was in sore trouble—surely, I say, America will not be over anxious to throw obstructions in the way of any party who may take in hand the chastisement of such an infamous power, no matter what the grounds of the quarrel. But when it comes to be understood that for the last ninety years, and up to a very recent period, England has been the deadly defamer and the secret or avowed enemy of America and American institutions—when it comes to be understood, that the statesmen, the business men and the wives and daughters of the citizens of the American Commonwealth, ever since the immortal Washington won the day for the oppressed of the whole world, have been subjected to the sneers and jibes of the English aristocracy and press, and held up to the ridicule of despotic Europe—when this comes to be understood, I repeat, in connection with the fact, that the cause of Ireland is the cause of human liberty and of republican institutions, there will be but little fear of America stepping out of her way to uphold the skull and cross-bones of St. George, either on this or on the other side of the Atlantic ocean, or, in fact, in any portion of the globe.”
“Nor will the clear-sighted children of the Republic be cajoled into a friendly attitude towards this blood-thirsty dastard, because that, in the feebleness and fear that have now overtaken her, she essays to gloze over the infamous acts of which she stands convicted before the nations, and assumes an air of friendship towards them. Had the Union fallen, through her infernal machinations, not a city throughout her dominions but would have blazed with joyful illuminations at the result; while her government would again introduce the impressments of 1812. Even when the slightest reverse was suffered by the arms of the North, the news was heralded throughout the whole of England with tokens of the most intense satisfaction; while both her people and statesmen took a fiendish delight in referring to the Commonwealth as “the late United States!” All this, I say, will influence, and ought to influence, America in favor of the independence of Ireland, and prevent the American people from regarding the present pusillanimous blandishments of John Bull as other than simply the result of cowardice, and an attempt to propitiate a great power that had survived his infernal machinations,