“Do you know what it was which most served to irritate France and estrange her from England during the first Republic? It was the Civil War in a portion of her territory, supported, subsidized, and assisted by Mr. Pitt. It was the encouragement and the arms given to Frenchmen, as heroical as yourselves, but Frenchmen fighting against their fellow citizens. This was not honorable warfare. It was a Royalist propagandism, waged with French blood against the Republic. This policy is not yet, in spite of all our efforts, entirely effaced from the memory of the nation. Well! this cause of dissension between Great Britain and us, we will never renew by taking any similar course. We accept with gratitude expressions of friendship from the different nationalities included in the British Empire. We ardently wish that justice may be found, and strengthen the friendship of races: that equality may become more and more its basis; but while proclaiming with you, with her (Great Britain), and with all, the holy dogma of fraternity, we will perform only acts of brotherhood, in conformity with our principles, and our feelings toward the Irish nation.”
There is the text of the document. It is printed with Great Primer No. 1 type, except the underlined portions which, to attract special attention, and convey an “Aha! see now what France will do for you?” are printed with English Clarendon on Great Primer body—an intensely black thick type.
Well, friend Rossa, that cowering Frenchman is dead, and that Republic which he so zealously guarded in the interest of England—not the Republic of the present, glory to it—is dead too! Had Lamartine lived to witness the revival of Trafalgar memories a few days ago, after a period of ninety years, I believe that he would bitterly regret ever having given birth to that disheartening document.
Hoping that you and yours are well, I am my dear friend Rossa,
Ever Faithfully Yours,
C. G. Doran.
CHAPTER XIII.
THE SCATTERING OF MY FAMILY. THE PHŒNIX SOCIETY.
John Mitchel, John Martin, Smith O’Brien, Terence Bellew McManus and other prominent men in the Young Ireland movement of 1848 were transported to Australia, and the movement collapsed. There was no armed fight for freedom. The Irish people had no arms of any account. England seized all they had, and she supplied with arms all the English that lived in Ireland. She supplied the Orangemen with arms, and she supplied arms to the Irish who were of the English religion. In the year 1863, John Power Hayes of Skibbereen gave me a gun and bayonet to be raffled, for the benefit of a man who was going to America. He told me it was a gun and bayonet that was given to him by the police in 1848, when all the men of the English religion who were in the town were secretly supplied with arms by the English government.