We who speak here to-night are the voice of one of the ancient
indestructible things of the world. We are the voice of an idea which is
older than any empire and will outlast every empire. We and ours, the
inheritors of that idea, have been at age-long war with one of the most
powerful empires that have ever been built up upon the earth; and that
empire will pass before we pass. We are older than England and we are
stronger than England. In every generation we have renewed the struggle,
and so it shall be unto the end. When England thinks she has trampled
out our battle in blood, some brave man rises and rallies us again; when
England thinks she has purchased us with a bribe, some good man redeems
us by a sacrifice. Wherever England goes on her mission of empire we
meet her and we strike at her; yesterday it was on the South African
veldt, to-day it is in the Senate House at Washington, to-morrow it may
be in the streets of Dublin. We pursue her like a sleuth-hound; we lie
in wait for her and come upon her like a thief in the night; and some
day we will overwhelm her with the wrath of God.
It is not that we are apostles of hate. Who like us has carried Christ’s
word of charity about the earth? But the Christ that said “My peace I
leave you, My peace I give you,” is the same Christ that said “I bring
not peace, but a sword.” There can be no peace between right and wrong,
between truth and falsehood, between justice and oppression, between
freedom and tyranny. Between them it is eternal war until the wrong is
righted, until the true thing is established, until justice is
accomplished, until freedom is won.
So when England talks of peace we know our answer: “Peace with you?
Peace while your one hand is at our throat and your other hand is in our
pocket? Peace with a footpad? Peace with a pickpocket? Peace with the
leech that is sucking our body dry of blood? Peace with the many-armed
monster whose tentacles envelop us while its system emits an inky fluid
that shrouds its work of murder from the eyes of men? The time has not
yet come to talk of peace.”
But England, we are told, offers us terms. She holds out to us the hand
of friendship. She gives us a Parliament with an Executive responsible
to it. Within two years the Home Rule Senate meets in College Green and
King George comes to Dublin to declare its sessions open. In
anticipation of that happy event our leaders have proffered England our
loyalty. Mr. Redmond accepts Home Rule as a “final settlement between
the two nations”; Mr. O’Brien in the fulness of his heart cries “God
Save the King”; Colonel Lynch offers England his sword in case she is
attacked by a foreign power.
And so this settlement is to be a final settlement. Would Wolfe Tone
have accepted it as a final settlement? Would Robert Emmet have accepted
it as a final settlement? Either we are heirs to their principles or we
are not. If we are, we can accept no settlement as final which does not
“_break the connection with England, the never-failing source of all our
political evils_”; if we are not, how dare we go in annual pilgrimage to
Bodenstown, how dare we gather here or anywhere to commemorate the faith
and sacrifice of Emmet? Did, then, these dead heroic men live in vain?
Has Ireland learned a truer philosophy than the philosophy of ’98, and a
nobler way of salvation than the way of 1803? Is Wolfe Tone’s definition
superseded, and do we discharge our duty to Emmet’s memory by according
him annually our pity?
To do the English justice, I do not think they are satisfied that
Ireland will accept Home Rule as a final settlement. I think they are a
little anxious to-day. If their minds were tranquil on the subject of
Irish loyalty they would hardly have proclaimed the importation of arms
into Ireland the moment the Irish Volunteers had begun to organise
themselves. They had given the Ulster faction which is used as a catspaw
by one of the English parties two years to organise and arm against that
Home Rule Bill which they profess themselves so anxious to pass: to the
Nationalists of Ireland they did not give two weeks. Of course, we can
arm in spite of them: to-day we are organising and training the men and
we have ways and means of getting arms when the men are ready for the
arms. The contention I make now, and I ask you to note it well, is that
England does not trust Ireland with guns; that under Home Rule or in the
absence of Home Rule England declares that we Irish must remain an
unarmed people; and England is right.
England is right in suspecting Irish loyalty, and those Irishmen who
promise Irish loyalty to England are wrong. I believe them honest; but
they have spent so much of their lives parleying with the English, they
have sat so often and so long at English feasts, that they have lost
communion with the ancient unpurchaseable faith of Ireland, the ancient
stubborn thing that forbids, as if with the voice of fate, any loyalty
from Ireland to England, any union between us and them, any surrender of
one jot or shred of our claim to freedom even in return for all the
blessings of the British peace.
I have called that old faith an indestructible thing. I have said that
it is more powerful than empires. If you would understand its might you
must consider how it has made all the generations of Ireland heroic.
Having its root in all gentleness, in a man’s love for the place where
his mother bore him, for the breast that gave him suck, for the voices
of children that sounded in a house now silent, for the faces that
glowed around a fireside now cold, for the story told by lips that will
not speak again, having its root, I say, in all gentleness, it is yet a
terrible thing urging the generations to perilous bloody attempts,
nerving men to give up life for the death-in-life of dungeons, teaching
little boys to die with laughing lips, giving courage to young girls to
bare their backs to the lashes of a soldiery.
It is easy to imagine how the spirit of Irish patriotism called to the
gallant and adventurous spirit of Tone or moved the wrathful spirit of
Mitchel. In them deep called unto deep: heroic effort claimed the heroic
man. But consider how the call was made to a spirit of different, yet
not less noble mould; and how it was answered. In Emmet it called to a
dreamer and he awoke a man of action; it called to a student and a
recluse and he stood forth a leader of men; it called to one who loved
the ways of peace and he became a revolutionary. I wish I could help you
to realise, I wish I could myself adequately realise, the humanity, the
gentle and grave humanity, of Emmet. We are so dominated by the memory
of that splendid death of his, by the memory of that young figure,
serene and smiling, climbing to the gallows above that sea of silent men
in Thomas Street, that we forget the life of which that death was only
the necessary completion; and the life has a nearer meaning for us than
the death. For Emmet, finely gifted though he was, was just a young man
with the same limitations, the same self-questionings, the same
falterings, the same kindly human emotions surging up sometimes in such
strength as almost to drown a heroic purpose, as many a young man we
have known. And his task was just such a task as many of us have
undertaken: he had to go through the same repellant routine of work, to
deal with the hard, uncongenial details of correspondence and committee
meetings; he had the same sordid difficulties that we have, yea, even
the vulgar difficulty of want of funds. And he had the same poor human
material to work with, men who misunderstood, men who bungled, men who
talked too much, men who failed at the last moment....
Yes, the task we take up again is just Emmet’s task of silent
unattractive work, the routine of correspondence and committees and
organising. We must face it as bravely and as quietly as he faced it,
working on in patience as he worked on, hoping as he hoped; cherishing
in our secret hearts the mighty hope that to us, though so unworthy, it
may be given to bring to accomplishment the thing he left
unaccomplished, but working on even when that hope dies within us.
I would ask you to consider now how the call I have spoken of was made
to the spirit of a woman, and how, equally, it was responded to.
Wherever Emmet is commemorated let Anne Devlin not be forgotten. Bryan
Devlin had a dairy farm in Butterfield Lane; his fields are still green
there. Five sons of his fought in ’98. Anne was his daughter, and she
went to keep house for Emmet when he moved into Butterfield House. You
know how she kept vigil there on the night of the rising. When all was
lost and Emmet came out in his hurried retreat through Rathfarnham to
the mountains, her greeting was--according to tradition it was spoken in
Irish, and Emmet must have replied in Irish--“Musha, bad welcome to you!
Is Ireland lost by you, cowards that you are, to lead the people to
destruction and then to leave them?” “Don’t blame me, Anne; the fault is
not mine,” said Emmet. And she was sorry for the pain her words had
inflicted, spoken in the pain of her own disappointment. She would have
tended him like a mother could he have tarried there, but his path lay
to Kilmashogue, and hers was to be a harder duty. When Sirr came out
with his soldiery she was still keeping her vigil. “Where is Emmet?” “I
have nothing to tell you.” To all their questions she had but one
answer: “I have nothing to say; I have nothing to tell you.” They swung
her up to a cart and half-hanged her several times; after each
half-hanging she was revived and questioned: still the same answer. They
pricked her breast with bayonets until the blood spurted out in their
faces. They dragged her to prison and tortured her for days. Not one
word did they extract from that steadfast woman. And when Emmet was
sold, he was sold, not by a woman, but by a man--by the friend that he
had trusted--by the counsel who, having sold him, was to go through the
ghastly mockery of defending him at the bar.
The fathers and mothers of Ireland should often tell their children that
story of Robert Emmet and that story of Anne Devlin. To the Irish
mothers who hear me I would say that when at night you kiss your
children and in your hearts call down a benediction, you could wish for
your boys no higher thing than that, should the need come, they may be
given the strength to make Emmet’s sacrifice, and for your girls no
greater gift from God than such fidelity as Anne Devlin’s.
It is more than a hundred years since these things were suffered; and
they were suffered in vain if nothing of the spirit of Emmet and Anne
Devlin survives in the young men and young women of Ireland. Does
anything of that spirit survive? I think I can speak for my own
generation. I think I can speak for my contemporaries in the Gaelic
League, an organisation which has not yet concerned itself with
politics, but whose younger spirits are accepting the full national idea
and are bringing into the national struggle the passion and the
practicalness which marked the early stages of the language movement. I
think I can speak for the young men of the Volunteers. So far, they have
no programme beyond learning the trade of arms: a trade which no man of
Ireland could learn for over a hundred years past unless he took the
English shilling. It is a good programme; and we may almost commit the
future of Ireland to the keeping of the Volunteers. I think I can speak
for a younger generation still: for some of the young men that are
entering the National University, for my own pupils at St. Enda’s
College, for the boys of Fianna Eireann. To the grey-haired men whom I
see on this platform, to John Devoy and Richard Burke, I bring, then,
this message from Ireland: that their seed-sowing of forty years ago has
not been without its harvest, that there are young men and little boys
in Ireland to-day who remember what they taught and who, with God’s
blessing, will one day take--or make--an opportunity of putting their
teaching into practice.
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Footnote 4:
An Address delivered at the Emmet Commemoration in the Aeolian Hall,
New York, 9th March, 1914.
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