“My son, I’m glad you’ve come,” he said.
So Frederick Douglass saw Ireland and came to know its people. He learned why women’s faces beneath their shawls aged so quickly. He watched children claw the débris on the coal-quays of Cork. He saw the rich grasslands of the Golden Vale where fine, fat cattle fed while babies died for milk. Looking out over the Lakes of Killarney, he saw on the one side uncultivated tracts, marshy wastes studded with patches of heather, with here and there a stunted fir tree; and on the other, along the foot of the mountains beside the lovely lakes, green, smiling fields and woods of almost tropical vegetation. He learned that in Ireland there were only rich and poor, only palaces and hovels.
“Misrule is due to ignorance and ignorance is due to misrule.” O’Connell tapped the short stem of his pipe on the table. “Few Englishmen ever visit Ireland. When they do they drive in a carriage from country house to country house. The swarms of beggars in Dublin only fill them with disgust.”
“But—But why don’t these beggars work?”
“There are no industries in Ireland. Our wool and wheat go into English mills. In Ireland, in order to work, one must have a plot of land.”
Frowning, Douglass grappled with the problem. Oppression then was not confined to black folks! There was some common reason for it all.
O’Connell nodded his head.
“Possession of the land! This is the struggle, whether we’re talking about the Gaels of Scotland and Ireland, the brown peoples of India, or the blacks of South Africa. Indeed, where are your red men in America?”
The young man’s face showed something of horror. Was the earth so small then that men must destroy each other to have their little bit?
“Not at all. But there have always been those who would share nothing. Conquest has come to be a glorious thing. Our heroes are the men who take, not those who give!”