As it became later, the party began to drop off, until about twelve o’clock, up went the shutters and round went the heavy key in the bar-room door—all having disappeared at the latter period, save Barry and one of his most intimate friends who seemed loath to leave, and inclined to take another glass. No sooner then, were the doors and windows securely fastened, and the gas extinguished, than both these parties accompanied by Tom with a bed-room lamp in his hand, proceeded to a small and comfortable apartment which was sacred to the foot of every individual who was not a tried friend of O’Brien. Here all three seated themselves beside a comfortable coal fire that burned brightly in the grate: when Tom, on extinguishing the lamp, after having lit the jet of gas that hung in the centre of the room, exclaimed:—
“Nick, my name’s not Tom O’Brien, or we have got the divil up-stairs!—but what he’s up to it’s hard to say: although I thought it was jist as well to let him take up his quarthers here, seem that I’ll be able to keep an eye on him—now that the times are becomin sarious.”
“Certainly,” replied Barry, “his appearance is far from prepossessing, but you know, Tom, it’s not always safe to judge a man by this criterion.”
“That’s thrue,” returned the other, “but didn’t you hear the fella how he wanted to sift you about the Irish sintiment of the garrison, as well as lade us out upon the feelins of the Irish in gineral throughout the Province?”
“I did, of course,” answered Nick, “but really thought that the gentleman, being a stranger, was simply asking for information’s sake only, and had no ulterior object in view.”
“I agree with you, O’Brien,” interrupted the third party, who was named Burk, and who had been in the saloon during the period Greaves was present, “there can be nothing good in so cunning a face; but what is the real news to-night, and have you heard from New York or Buffalo?”
“I have harde from both places,” returned Tom, “and everythin looks well; but how are things here, and are you all prepared to assist the invading army when they cross the lines; and what number of men can we fairly count upon?”
“It has, I believe, been ascertained beyond a shadow of doubt,” replied Burk, “that there are upwards of one hundred thousand men throughout the Provinces who would at once rush to arms if they found the flag of the Irish Republic firmly planted at any one point within our borders; while it is known or believed, that more than twice that number would follow in their wake, if Toronto was once in the hands of the invaders. In fact, Toronto and Montreal once taken, the day is ours, for we should have the French almost to a man, no matter what Monsieur George Etienne or Master John Alexander may say to the contrary. Canada is evidently tired of British rule, and is only kept from kicking over the traces by a pack of government officials who hold the purse strings, and a subsidized press that destroys the homogeneity of the people, by making them doubt each other, and impressing every man disaffected to the Crown, with the idea that every other individual Colonist, or nearly so, is opposed to him. In this way, the sentiment of independence which underlies the nine tenths of our population is obstructed and embarrassed, and one man prompted to look with distrust upon another, although both may entertain precisely the same sentiments in relation to the desirability of throwing off the British yoke. As to how the army stands, Nick here can tell you more about that than I can.”
“The army,” said Barry, “is just as you might expect it to be. The Irish who compose it in part, are, as you know, not British soldiers from choice, but from necessity. They had no resource between starvation and a red coat; so that their oath of allegiance to the English Crown may be said to have been exacted from them under pain of death. For ages, their country had been devastated and plundered by the power that now holds them in special thrall, and the means of existence wrested from them through the inhuman exactions of a tyrannical government. Their name and race had been banned, their humble homesteads razed to the ground, and their families scattered, naked and hungry, throughout the length and breadth of the land, or exiled to foreign shores. The stranger had stolen in on their hearthstone, robbed them of their lands, goods and chattles, usurped their powers of local legislation, and then closed every door to preferment against them, leaving them without a hope or a crust for the future, 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.