XXV.
Meantime, events had been developing themselves in a strange and unlooked-for way. O’Donovan Rossa—speaking to the Irish in America through the columns of the Irish World—had advocated the establishment of a Skirmishing Fund in the following style:—
“Five thousand dollars will have to be collected before the campaign can be started. England will not know how or where she is to be struck. A successful stroke or any stroke that will do her 500,000 dollars’ worth of damage will bring us funds enough to carry on the work: and by working on incessantly and persistently, the patient dirt and powder shock will bring out enough perhaps to carry on the war.”
In the same issue of the Irish World, Patrick Ford, in the course of a commendatory article, said—
“What will this irregular warfare of our Irish Skirmishers effect? It will do this much. It will harass and annoy England. It will help to create her difficulty and hasten our opportunity. It will not only annoy England, but it will hush her too. This is what we look for from the Skirmishers. One hundred dollars expended on skirmishing may cause to England a loss of 100,000,000 dollars. That would be a damaging blow to the enemy; and what is to prevent the dealing one of three or four such blows every year?”
Here I shall drop Rossa and his Skirmishing Fund for the moment, to say a few words about Ford. The opportunity seems a favourable one for dealing with a man whose name has been so prominent of late years, and clearing up a few of the many misconceptions which appear to exist regarding him. Like O’Donovan Rossa, his colleague at this time in skirmishing matters, Ford’s position in Irish revolutionary affairs has been quite misunderstood in British quarters outside the Parnellite party. As a matter of fact Ford is not, and never has been, a member of the Clan-na-Gael. True it is that he was a member of the old Fenian organisations which preceded it—as, for instance, the Irish Confederation, but in the membership of the last and most powerful of all the branches of the Irish-American conspiracy, the editor of the Irish World has had no place. The secret of his position and influence lies in his paper. This, from the very moment of its start, has been a pronounced success, reaching a high-water mark of influence and circulation, which threw the puny efforts of its competitors completely into the shade. The paper came into existence at the proper moment for itself; it was well edited, well printed, and splendidly equipped with news from every quarter, and on every point. It caught the public fancy and “went” amazingly. Ford, originally a printer and a man of no mean attainment, gathered round him a staff of equally clever writers, established correspondents at every important centre, and working at very high pressure, was on the point of failing on several occasions, only to escape through the assistance of friends, politicians, or capitalists, willing to oblige for certain considerations. Indeed, if I am not very much in error, matters are not in the most favourable way for the paper at this very time.
Patrick Ford, according to Michael Davitt, is a most worthy disciple of the Christian principles, and a man whose life would serve as a model for very many of those who criticise this dynamite advocate’s character in no enthusiastic vein. Speaking of the man simply “on the view” as the American phrase has it, Davitt’s observations are not so far-fetched as they would appear to be at the first blush. In appearance and manner, the editor of the Irish World is quite the opposite of the man you would figure to yourself after reading his dynamite appeals and exordiums in his own journal. Quiet and unobtrusive alike in look and speech, he is as mild a mannered man as ever scuttled a ship. Of medium height, spare of build and spare of feature, without any ferocity whatever marking the outer man, he gives the observer the idea of being a quiet, sedate, and rather retiring business person. Although a vigorous and effective writer, he is not remarkable for his platform utterances, and while a good talker, is by no means an orator.
Associated with Patrick Ford in his connection with Irish-American affairs have been his brother Augustine and his nephew Austin. Augustine, whose name comes into prominence with Rossa in the Skirmishing Fund affair, was the publisher, as distinct from the editor, of the Irish World; while Austin, then a young fellow, was afterwards to become a member of the Clan-na-Gael, and to serve as the medium of communication between the leaders of the Revolutionary organisation and his uncle, the editor of what was undoubtedly, though unofficially, their mouthpiece, the Irish World. There were many reasons for an alliance, unofficial though it might be, existing between the Irish World and those charged with the conduct of the vast secret conspiracy known to the initiated as the V.C. For what the Irish World, with its extended popularity, its great influence, and its enormous circulation, championed in public, the Clan-na-Gael worked for in private. Ford and his fellow-workers, in a different path, understood each other full well; and when, within a year after the establishment of the Skirmishing Fund, it became desirable that the Clan-na-Gael should take charge of it, there was no more ardent advocate of the change than he. And as in the early, so in the later years. When the new departure came to the front, Ford and his Clan-na-Gael friends were of the same mind as to its importance, and the necessity for supporting it. When dynamite came to be the order of the day, he was its loud-tongued apostle; and when, later still, “martyrs” like Brady and Curley suffered in Ireland the just consequences of their fiendish part in the Phœnix Park murders, the editor of the Irish World was first to fill the gap with a fund on behalf of their families, excluding from its benefits all connected with those who had had the good sense, though bad patriotism, to plead “guilty” to their part in the fell transaction.