Secretaries.—Patrick Haley, Peter O'Connell, and John Green.
John Boyle O'Reilly was present, and Captain Anthony was the guest of honor. Mr. Smith, the Catalpa's mate, and Thomas Hassett, one of the rescued men, were also present.
Dr. Hayes expressed his gratitude that the political prisoners were now in the land of the free, where the flag which protected them on the Catalpa would continue to protect them as long as it waved.
O'Reilly's address on this occasion was one of his most eloquent efforts, and it is to be regretted that it is not preserved in its entirety. The summaries which were printed in the newspapers do him very inadequate justice.
He said that it was with no ordinary feelings that he had come. He owed to New Bedford no ordinary debt, and he would gladly have come a thousand miles to do honor to New Bedford whalemen. Seven years of liberty, wife, children, and a happy home in a free country were his debt of gratitude, and when the close of his sentence came, in 1886, his debt to New Bedford might be grown too heavy to bear.
They were there, he said, to do honor to Captain Anthony, to show their gratitude to the man who had done a brave and wonderful deed. The self-sacrifice and unfailing devotion of him who had taken his life in his hand and beached his whaleboat on the penal colony, defying its fearful laws, defying the gallows and the chain-gang, in order to keep faith with the men who had placed their trust in him,—this is almost beyond belief in our selfish and commonplace time.
There were sides to this question worth looking at, he continued. To Irishmen it was significant in manifold ways, one of which was that these men, being soldiers, could not be left in prison without demoralizing the Irishmen in the English army, who would not forget that their comrades had been forsaken and left to die in confinement, when the civilian leaders of the movement had been set free. But the spirit that prompted their release was larger and nobler than this, and its beauty could be appreciated by all men, partaking as it did of the universal instinct of humanity to love their race and their native land.
England said that the rescue was a lawless and disgraceful filibustering raid. Not so, said Mr. O'Reilly. If these men were criminals, the rescue would be criminal. But they were political offenders against England, not against law, or order, or religion. They had lain in prison for ten years, with millions of their countrymen asking their release, imploring England, against their will to beg, to set these men at liberty. Had England done so it would have partially disarmed Ireland. A generous act by England would be reciprocated instantly by millions of the warmest hearts in the world. But she was blind, as of old; blind and arrogant and cruel. She would not release the men; she scorned to give Ireland an answer. She called the prisoners cowardly criminals, not political offenders.
After the ship sailed and there was a long time when no tidings came, O'Reilly said that doubts and fears came, as they were sure to do; but Captain Hathaway said once and always of Captain Anthony: "The man who engaged to do this will keep that engagement, or he won't come out of the penal colony."