But these Orangemen—very few, if any, of whom, we are told, are American citizens—outrage American as well as Irish manhood. Their
celebrations here are an insult to every true American, for they are in honor of principles and deeds abhorrent to every American heart. For them to bring their old quarrels hither from a foreign land would be reprehensible, even if their quarrels were not utterly disgraceful to them, but they become a gross outrage when the real character of their quarrel with their loyal countrymen is considered. The deeds of the party in Ireland they represent are such as are condemned by every distinctive American principle, and a more infamous party it would be difficult to find in any country on earth. They represent the party that in Ireland fought for a foreign invader and a chief of rebels against their own country, and were at once traitors to their king and nation. They represent the party that enacted the infamous and brutalizing penal laws which deprived the loyal Irish—who in the battle of the Boyne fought for and at the command of their rightful king against rebels, traitors, foreign invaders, and enemies—of every vestige of civil and religious liberty, even making it a crime for a father to teach his own child letters, and doomed their descendants, till within our own memory, to the most cruel, heartless, and hopeless oppression ever endured by any people in the world; they represent the party that, after the Presbyterian and Jacobin movement of 1798, into which some Catholics had been inveigled by the promise of freedom for their religion, and left to do the fighting and to bear almost alone the penalty of defeat, were the authors of the savage butcheries inflicted by the Orange yeomanry on the Catholic peasantry, even on those who had taken no part in the movement, and were innocent of all offence except that of sighing to be delivered from bondage, and treated as men
made in God’s image, not as wild beasts, whom it is a merit to hunt out and shoot down wherever they can be found. They commemorate in their processions, their banners, their songs and tunes, the triumph of treachery, baseness, bigotry, persecution, oppression, murder, rapine, and wholesale massacres, unsurpassed in the history of the most barbarous and heathenish nations.
Never was there a more cruel and bloodthirsty party, one redeemed by fewer virtues or blackened by more or greater crimes, or more deserving the execration of mankind, than that which these Orangemen represent and delight to honor. Is it no insult to us free-born Americans for them to come here and flaunt in our faces their banners stained with the blood of the innocent and the good, branded by the widow’s curse, and wet with the orphan’s tears—symbols of ages of wrong, oppression, and religious intolerance and persecution? Is it here, in free America, they dare come to boast in public of their crimes, and glory in their infamy? Do not we Americans profess to abhor persecution, tyranny, and oppression? Do we not, as a sovereign people, proclaim to the world that we have opened an asylum to the wronged, the oppressed, the downtrodden of every land and of every belief? Where, then, is our manhood when we allow the tyrant, the oppressor, the persecutor, to come here and insult and outrage his victims in the very asylum we profess to have opened to them? What greater insult to all that is noble and manly can be offered Americans than to be even asked to protect those who will not respect even the right of asylum?
No, no; the press has taken only a one-sided view in calling the prohibition of the Orange procession a
violation of freedom and a cowardly yielding to Irish or Catholic dictation. It was no such thing. The Orangemen had no right on their side, and were entitled to no protection. Liberty was on the other side, and its vindication and the right of asylum required us as Americans to protect the victims of the Orange party who had sought refuge with us from Orange insult and outrage on our own soil. His excellency the governor of the state also took only a hasty and a very incorrect view of the case in revoking the very proper order of the police. We are as far as he can be from yielding to the dictation of the mob. When a mob has collected, it must be admitted to no parley, and the only answer to be given to its demands is the reading of the riot act, and a whiff of grape-shot or a shower of musket-balls. But no threats of violence should ever deter authority from doing what is right, and, in this case, right was not on the side of the Orangemen. Authority must be just as well as firm. The threats of violence were wrong, but they did not put the Orangemen in the right. Authority was bound to protect the Orangemen from actual violence, but it was not bound to protect them in the performance of acts which they had no moral or legal right to perform, and which it was foreseen, if permitted, would lead to violence. One wrong is not redressed by permitting another that must provoke it.
His excellency’s revocation of the order of the police prohibiting the Orange procession, and promise to protect the procession by all the force at his command, cannot be defended on the ground that the party opposed threatened violence in case the procession took place, unless it be assumed that the Orangemen had a perfect moral or legal right to
march in procession through our streets in their regalia, and with their insulting banners flying and bands playing offensive marches. But they had no such right, as we have seen, and the party making the threats, however wrong the threats were, had the right to be protected from the insult and outrage offered to their feelings by such a display. The vindication of liberty did not require the procession to take place, for liberty is not infringed where no right is violated or abridged; and the assertion of the majesty of the law never requires protection of a wrong because they who would be aggrieved by it have threatened, if permitted, they will attempt by violence to right themselves. Neither American liberty nor law required the Orange procession to be permitted, and if both liberty and law required a mob, when collected, to be dispersed and the violence suppressed, they both also required the protection of American citizens from public insult and outrage. His excellency forgot the duty of protecting American citizens from wrong, and thought only of protecting a foreign and wholly un-American party in committing it.
Yet we have no doubt that the mistaken conduct of the governor—an able man, a good lawyer, and for the most part a worthy chief magistrate of the state—was chiefly prompted by the clamor against Catholics, and the charge brought against his party by its opponents of acting under the dictation of Catholics, who, of course, it is assumed, act always under the dictation of their clergy, and was intended to refute the charge by showing his readiness to protect even Protestant Orangemen, and shoot down their hereditary enemies, though Catholics. The charge, we know, was made against the party now in power in
this state; but his excellency should not have allowed it to move him. It is no doubt true that, but for the votes of citizens who happen to be Catholics, he would never have been governor of the state, and his party would be, at least for the present, in a hopeless minority; but we cannot allow that Catholics have presumed upon the fact, or asked anything not their right as simple American citizens, and we know that they have obtained less than their equal rights, even in this city, where they can probably count not much less than one-half of the population. But the charge is a mere party trick, designed, through the sectarian prejudice against Catholicity, to throw the party now in out of power. The governor seems to us to have fallen into the trap his political enemies set for him, and has not unlikely damaged the political prospects both of himself and of his party.