We are strangers at home,
We are exiles in Erin.
Leaving the “bad times,” the sad times, even though they were in the happy time of youth, I must now reluctantly move myself up to the time of my manhood. From 1848 to 1853, I lived in the house of Morty Downing—save some four months of the five years. He had five children, and we grew to be much of one mind; Patrick, Kate, Denis, Simon and Dan. They are dead. The four sons came to America, after three of them had put in some time of imprisonment in Ireland in connection with Phœnixism and Fenianism. These four went into the American army. Patrick was in the war as Lieutenant Colonel of the Forty-second (Tammany) Regiment. He died in Washington some ten years ago. Denis was Captain in a Buffalo regiment, and lost a leg at the battle of Gettysburg. He had command of the military company at the execution of Mrs. Surratt in Washington; he made a visit to Ireland; died there, and is buried in Castlehaven. Simon and Dan were in the regular army and are dead. All my family were in the war and are dead. My brother John was in the Sixty-ninth Pennsylvania regiment; my brother Con served on the warship Iroquois, and my sister’s husband, Walter Webb, served in the Sixty-ninth Pennsylvania cavalry.
I now go back to my recollections in Ireland. I remember the time of the passing of the Ecclesiastical Titles bill in 1851, when England made a law subjecting to a fine of £100 any Catholic bishop in Ireland who would sign his name as bishop or archbishop of his diocese. As soon as this bill was passed, Archbishop McHale defied it, and issuing a pastoral, signed his name to it as “John McHale, Archbishop of Tuam.” England swallowed the defiance, and did not prosecute him. The Rev. Father Perraud, a French priest, writing on that subject says that England came to see that the policy of arresting a bishop for such a breach of law would not work well. Here are a few of his words:
“It is useless to conceal the fact it is not regiments encamped in Ireland; it is not the militia of 12,000 peelers distributed over the whole of the surface of the land, which prevents revolt and preserves the peace. During a long period, especially in the last century, the excess of misery to which Ireland was reduced had multiplied the secret societies of the peasantry. Who have denounced those illegal associations with the most persevering, powerful, and formidable condemnation? Who have ever been so energetic in resistance to secret societies as the Irish Episcopacy? On more than one occasion the bishops have even hazarded their popularity in this way.
“They could, at a signal, have armed a million contestants against a persecuting government—and that signal they refused to give.”
I remember the starting of the Tenant League movement in 1852, that movement that opened a field of operation for the Sadliers, the Keoghs, and others who went in to free Ireland by parliamentary agitation. It failed, as other movements since have failed that went in for freeing Ireland by parliamentary agitation. It is in that English Parliament the chains for Ireland are forged, and any Irish patriot who goes into that forge to free Ireland will soon find himself welded into the agency of his country’s subjection to England.
I remember the Crimean war of 1853-54, and the war of the Indian mutiny of 1857. There was hardly a red-coat soldier to be seen in Ireland those times. Even the police force was thinned down, by many of them having volunteered to the seat of war, as members of a land-transport corps that England called for. The Irish National Cause was dead or asleep those times. The cry of England’s difficulty being Ireland’s opportunity was not heard in the land.
The cry of “England’s difficulty being Ireland’s opportunity” is the “stock in trade” of many Irishmen in Ireland and America who do very little for Ireland but traffic upon its miseries for their own personal benefit. Irishmen of the present day should work to free Ireland in their own time, and not be shifting from their own shoulders to the shoulders of the men of a future generation the work they themselves should do. The opportunity for gathering in the crops is the harvest time, those who will not sow the seed in springtime will have no harvest, and it is nothing but arrant nonsense for Irish patriot orators to be blathering about England’s difficulty being Ireland’s opportunity, when they will do nothing to make the opportunity. I immediately class as a fraud and a humbug any Irishman that I hear talking in that strain.