James Jeffrey Roche

“ Were Ireland free to-morrow, we would continue our lives as Americans. Our numbers and interests are so great and so deep here that, paraphrasing the words of your distinguished national leader, we can't spare a single Irish-American. But, nevertheless, we leave others to greet you as a cosmopolitan, as a poet, as a novelist, as a historian; and we speak the welcome of the heart, because we Irish-Americans are proud of you as an Irishman. We know how hard it is for one living under the British Crown to be at once an Irish patriot and a successful man of letters. ”

“ The vagrant sunbeam that finds its way to the lonely occupant of a prison cell, but speaks of the liberty which others enjoy, of the happiness that falls to the lot of those whom misfortune has not dragged from the pleasures of life; the cries, the noise, and uproar of London which penetrate the silent corridors, and re-echo in the cheerless cells of Millbank, are so many mocking voices that come to laugh at the misery their walls inclose, and arouse the recollection of happier days to probe the wounds of present sorrow. ”

“ Our friend was a human man. I am not here to tell of his attainments in letters, or of his success as a writer for the press, as an author, a poet, gifted with a versatile and ever-ready and competent pen and tongue; nor even to recall the oft-told story of his early life—his efforts for Ireland, his captivity, his escape by help of generous sons of America; nor even to describe the manly form, the noble presence, the hardy and athletic temperament that we looked upon with wonder and delight; but I would wish to remind you of the characteristics of our friend as a man. ”

“ We are here to welcome one who embodies the spirit of Garrison and Phillips; one who went unarmed and clear-eyed to face the danger, to attack the wrong-doer in his high place, for the sake of the poor and oppressed; one who represents in perfection the manly and moral side of a great question and a brave nation; one who has come to us wounded and breathless from the fury of the mob, in whose ears still ring the death-yell and the crack of the revolver; a man who is the very type and idol of his nation—the fearless editor and patriot, William O'Brien. ”

“ Men who knew us both will expect from me no eulogy of Boyle O'Reilly. You mourn the journalist, the orator, the poet, the patriot of two peoples—the strong, tender, true, and knightly character. I mourn with you, and I also mourn—alone.
But, after all, the dead speak for themselves. No friend in prose or verse can add a cubit to his stature. No foe, however mendacious, can lessen his fame or the love humanity bears him. ”

“ There is to me more of sorrow in this meeting than of indignation—sorrow and grief for the innocent hearts that are afflicted by the murderous blows of these assassins, and these include every Irish heart that throbs in Ireland today. The hearts and hands of the Irish people are innocent of this crime. There is not an Irish mark upon it. There is no indication here of hot Irish blood—of the sudden unpremeditated blow of passion—of the hasty vengeance which ever marks the awful presence of bloodshed in Ireland. No Irishman ever killed his enemy with a dagger. ”

“ It is the biography of a Day. It is a photograph, of twenty-four hours' length, of the mysterious river of time that is sweeping past us forever. And yet we take our year's newspapers, which contain more tales of sorrow and suffering, and joy and success, and ambition and defeat, and villainy and virtue, than the greatest book ever written, and we give them to the girl to light the fire. It is a strange fact that nobody prizes a newspaper for its abstract value until it is about a century out of date. It would seem that newspapers are like wine; the older they are, the more valuable. ”

“ One had to be Irish, not only in blood but also in heart and soul, before he ventured to amuse O'Reilly with any jest, however harmless, at the foibles of his countrymen.
But how gladly he welcomed any praise of their virtues, how eagerly he jumped at the least extenuation of their faults, how unreservedly he took to his heart the man who championed their cause! "He could not hate any man who loved Ireland," says Count Plunkett. I will add, he could embrace his bitterest personal enemy, if that enemy only served Ireland. ”

“ But what of their blood and their race? These brave men are neither Dutch nor Irish—they are Americans. And the men of Hull are types not only of Massachusetts, but of America. A section of Hull is a section of the nation. We are gathering and boiling down here all the best blood of Europe—the blood of the people. Not to build up an Anglo-Saxon or any other petty community, but to make the greatest nation and the strongest manhood that God ever smiled upon. O'Reilly remembered his life-saving friends, a year later, when an opportunity arose of his being serviceable to one of the heroes. ”

“ Sir, we know that you are a poor man; and we love and honor you for your poverty, for we know that it is the price of your principle. Instead of being the governor of a great British province, or of sitting in high imperial office, with the title of Lord or Earl, as so many purchasable and weaker men have done, Justin McCarthy comes to America, with the simple title of his own genius,—and we recognize it as a prouder coronet than that conferred by king or kaiser. ”

“ It is heroic to prepare for war with a tyrant power. Patriots will always win the admiration of mankind for daring to meet the bloodshed of battle for their country's liberty. But the patriot who is willing to go to that sacrifice will be the first to condemn the aimless and secret shedding of blood in time of peace.
Since the Land League was put down in Ireland, the discontent of the suffering people has had no vent. Such a state of things is always full of danger. A smoldering fire only needs a breath to leap to flame. ”

“ But the thing that most deeply afflicts the colored American is not going to be cured by politics. You have received from politics already about all it can give you. You may change the law by politics; but it is not the law that is going to insult and outrage and excommunicate every colored American for generations to come. You can't cure the conceit of the white people that they are better than you by politics, nor their ignorance, nor their prejudice, nor their bigotry, nor any of the insolences which they cherish against their colored fellow-citizens. ”

“ If England's pride is too great to yield under compulsion, what shall be said of Ireland's pride? Are the scourgings, exile, starvation, misreport of nearly a thousand years to be obliterated at the order of an act of Parliament? The nations that prize civilization and appreciate the force and limit of human statutes should urge justice and amity on England as well as Ireland. The evil cannot be stamped out; it must be soothed out by Christian gentleness and generosity. The social dangers of our time can only be averted by a higher order of law. ”

“ God send more men as lovable and unselfish as he! A gentleman born and bred, he chose to live in poverty, putting all things aside that might interfere with his dream of a free Ireland. He never stained his white hand with one unworthy coin from the treasury of Fenianism. O'Mahony was the incarnation of his cause, sincere, honest, unselfish, and uncalculating—not wise as the world judges, but wiser, perhaps, than he or the world knew, in cherishing a dream:
For a dreamer lives forever. ”

“ Secret organization to commit violent crime is an accursed disease. It has blighted Ireland, under the names of Ribbonism, Orangeism, and Whiteboyism. It has blasted every country that ever resorted to it. It is the poison of patriotic action. Passion and ignorance are its patents, and its children are murder and cruel crime. The voice of the Church is always against it, and the wise leaders of the people have everywhere abhorred it. The country that allows it to become rife, which sympathizes with its dark deeds, is not fit for freedom. Ireland has not so sympathized. ”

“ From the Gulf of Mexico to Canada and from Boston to the Pacific the blood of the people goes out to you, not because you are an aristocrat with an English title, but because you are an Irishman, a patriot, a gentleman with pluck, courage, and sacrificial strength in you. I ask you, sir, do you regret any class you have abandoned to come to the welcome of this pulsing, human, American-liberty-loving blood of the world, instead of a class? Jolin Breslin, the gallant leader of the Catalpa rescue, died in New York on November 18. ”

“ Let the end of a great life become sublime in the history of Great Britain and Ireland by a deed of magnanimity and wisdom. It is not too late to win Irish loyalty for a union which leaves her as free as England—the only union that can satisfy Ireland and make the British Empire more powerful than ever. ”

“ Parnell can afford to praise; but he could only afford to praise one man in such terms. For all the triumphs of his genius, we honor Justin McCarthy; for his unselfishness, we respect him; for his poverty, we reverence him; but for his love of Ireland, and his devotion to the national cause and the welfare of her people, we love him. And I ask you, gentlemen, to drink, "Long life and happiness to Justin McCarthy!" It was the rare privilege of O'Reilly to be appreciated and loyed during his life as few men have ever been loved. ”

“ Impoverished and oppressed, Ireland is no field for literary fame or fortune. Poor Ireland is a fruitful mother of genius, but a barren nurse. Irishmen who write books must gravitate to London. Ireland deplores her absentee landlords; but she has reason as deep to deplore her absent men of genius. England has gathered brilliant Irishmen as she would have gathered diamonds in Irish fields, and set them in her own diadem. ”

“ To very few is it given to be the poet or patriot above his fellows, and he is both.
It was a strange juxtaposition that gave him, an Irishman, proscribed and outlawed from England, the opportunity of welcoming in America, from a place of honor, a man who stood in Parliament, one of the foremost statesmen and historians of the British empire. Few, if any, could have made the address O'Reilly made; no man not born with the heritage of Irish blood could have compassed its peculiar poetry; no man not in the enjoyment of political freedom could have equaled its proud independence. ”

“ He was passionately fond of liberty, because he believed it to be a gift of God to men; and his voice and pen made earth ring with his denunciations of wrong wherever found,whether among the cotters of Ireland, amid the serfs of Russia, or in the negro cabins of the South. Liberty was his life idea, God its source, and humanity its application. As a silver trumpet sounding the note of human rights, he championed humanity; but his love was not the humanity of a revolution which ignored and blasphemed God, but the humanity which a crucified Saviour had redeemed and ennobled. ”

“ Politics is the snare and delusion of white men as well as black. Politics tickles the skin of the social order; but the disease lies deep in the internal organs. Social equity is based on justice; politics change on the opinion of the time. The black man's skin will be a mark of social inferiority so long as white men are conceited, ignorant, unjust, and prejudiced. You cannot legislate these qualities out of the white—you must steal them out by teaching, illustration, and example.
No man ever came into the world with so grand an opportunity as the American negro. ”

“ In the name of the Irish-American citizens of Boston and Massachusetts, Mr. Justin McCarthy, I express to you the deep pride we feel in the fame and eminence you have achieved in the high and arduous field of letters, the admiration we cherish for your genius, and the gratitude and affection we offer for your unselfish loyalty to Ireland. You are one who need not stand on national or race lines in receiving a welcome. Wherever men are cultured and intellectual, your welcome awaits you. ”

“ John Boyle O'Reilly delivered a spirited impromptu address as follows:
Sir, centuries before Christopher Columbus was born, this Irish cause was as vivid and as well defined as it is to-day. Speeches and meetings of Irishmen at any time, for nearly a thousand years, were representations of this meeting and our speeches to-night, and nothing could have kept that alive in our hearts but the repeated scattering of the life blood of our men over the soil of our country. We have made the soil of Ireland fat with sacrifice, and, thank the Lord, we are seeing the harvest here. ”

“ All that Dickens says of the prison in Philadelphia applies equally to Millbank:
"I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body; and because its ghastly signs and tokens are not so palpable to the eye and sense of touch as scars upon the flesh; because its wounds are not upon the surface, and it extorts few cries that human ears can hear; therefore, I the more denounce it, as a secret punishment which slumbering humanity is not roused up to stay. ”

“ Ireland asks for the moral support of all good men of all nations in her effort to secure Home Rule. Surely, the Government that has no other answer to give to an industrious, moral people, living in so rich a land, than starvation or emigration, is arraigned and condemned in the sight of God and man, and ought to be wiped out. The Government of England ought to be taken from the hands of the cruel and senseless aristocracy that has misruled so long; and it ought to be passed into the hands of the English and Irish people, to whom it belongs. ”

“ It is the simplest of truths to say that the death of no private citizen in America, or perhaps in the world, could have caused such genuine and widespread grief as followed that of John Boyle O'Reilly. The sorrow was not confined to people of his own race or faith. Americans of every race appreciated the patriotic spirit of this adopted citizen, and recognized that in his death the country had lost not only a man of rare genius, but a leader whose counsels were as wise as his loyalty was fervent and unfaltering. ”

“ I often think of you and ask myself if there is any doubt about your safety, and while others think there is, Paterson, for instance, I think there is no doubt, old boy, but you are on Yankee soil, and, with the help of God, I will soon be with you; and I hope the time is not far hence when some of your old friends from Australia will be with you, enjoying freedom instead of bondage. Bondage, do I call it! Worse than bondage, for the slave in bondage has no one to scorn him but his master, while those gentlemen are suffering the scorn of a whole nation, and what is it for? ”

“ A hundred years ago, when she had to grant Ireland a free Parliament, the position of England was not so perilous as it is now, nor had the Irish people then one tenth of their present strength.
One magnanimous statesman in England, one leader with the courage and wisdom of genius, would solidify the British Empire to-day with a master stroke of politics. He would abolish the Union, and leave Ireland as she stood eighty-five years ago, a happy, free, confederated part of the Empire. ”