power draws us back into the dread bosom of the past. The freshness of life dies out of us; we grow to the spot, and feel a kinship with stones which re-echoed the footsteps of saints, which resounded with the voice of prayer. It seems almost a sacrilege to live when the great and the good lie dead at our feet.
But why stop we here? Is not Ireland covered with ruins as reverend and as sad as these? Throughout the land they stand
“As stands a lofty mind,
Worn, but unstooping to the baser crowd,
All tenantless, save to the crannying wind,
Or holding dark communion with the cloud.”
What need of history’s blood-stained page to tell the sad story of Ireland’s wrongs and Ireland’s woes? O’Connell never spoke as speak these roofless cathedrals, these broken walls and crumbling arches, these fallen columns and shattered crosses. The traveller who in Jerusalem beholds the weary and worn children of Israel sitting in helpless grief amid the scattered stones of Solomon’s Temple, need not be told how the enemies of the Holy City compassed her about; how the sword and famine and the devouring flame swallowed up the people; how her walls were broken down, her holy of holies profaned, her priests slaughtered, her streets made desolate, until not a stone was left upon a stone.
The massacres of Wexford and Drogheda; the confiscation in a single day of half the land of Ireland; the driving her people into the ports of Munster to be shipped to regions of pestilence and death; the expulsion of every Catholic from the rich fields of Ulster; the exile of the whole nation beyond the Shannon; the violated treaty of Limerick, are but episodes in this
tragedy of centuries. Even the Penal Code, the most hideous and inhuman ever enacted by Christian or pagan people, tells but half the story.
That the Irish Catholic had for centuries been held in bondage by a law which violated every good and generous sentiment of the human heart, I knew. He could not vote, he could not bear witness, he could not bring suit, he could not sit on a jury, he could not go to school, he could not teach school, he could not practise law or medicine, he could not travel five miles from his home; he could own nothing which he might not be forced to give up or renounce his faith; he could not keep or use any kind of weapon, even in self-defence; his children were offered bribes to betray him; he could not hear Mass, he could not receive the sacraments; in his death-agony the priest might not be near to console him. All this I knew, and yet I had never realized the condition to which such inhuman legislation must reduce a people. That this Code, which Montesquieu said must have been contrived by devils, and which Burke declared to be the fittest instrument ever invented by man to degrade and destroy a nation, had failed to accomplish its fiendish purpose, I also knew. The Irish people, deprived of everything, and almost of the hope of ever having anything in this world, remained superior to fate. With a fidelity to religious conviction without example in the history of the world, they retained the chastity, the unbroken courage, the cheerful temper and generous love which had always distinguished them; and that in travelling among them I should find it more and more impossible to doubt of this was but