Liberty Vol. III. No. 17. | Liberty, Not the Daughter But the Mother of Order

“For always in thine eyes, O Liberty!

Shines that high light whereby the world is saved;

And though thou slay us, we will trust in thee.”

John Hay.

On Picket Duty.

Will every reader of Liberty kindly call the attention of his friends in general and his Irish friends in particular to the serial story begun on the second page of this issue, entitled “Ireland,” translated from the French by Sarah E. Holmes?

At the recent French elections Henri Rochefort was elected a member of the chamber of deputies. It is a pity. Why should a man who has proved himself so powerful in guiding men by reason and wit descend to the business of governing them by arbitrary power? Rochefort, the parliamentarian, can only neutralise the efforts of Rochefort, the pamphleteer.

The short-sighted censors of the drama in France have forbidden the representation of Zola’s “Germinal” — the only novel fairly entitled to dispute with Hugo’s “Les Mislrables” the honor of being the greatest ever written — on the stage of the Chatelet theatre in Paris. The ground of this outrageous decree is not, as some may suppose, Zola’s unparalleled audacity of expression concerning the sexual lives of laborers and capitalists, but “the socialistic tendency of the work, and especially the seventh scene, the strike of the miners,” where the police fire on the unfortunate workingmen. I join my voice with Henri Rochefort’s in urging Zola to “render a real service, not only to letters, but to the great cause of Liberty,” by insisting that the manager of the Chatelet shall produce “Germinal” in spite of the censors and the “republican” government behind them.

R. R. Bowker, writing on capital and interest in the Des Moines “Million,” says: “Proudhon, the French socialist, who warred against capital and held that ‘property is robbery,’ organized a ‘People’s Bank,’ which was to abolish interest proper, get rid of insurance by dividing the loss among all the depositors, and bring the rate of interest down to the mere cost of administration. Before it got to that point the bank failed, just as the man’s horse died when he had him down to one straw a day and expected him to live on nothing tomorrow.” Practically this is a lie, for it is an attempt to deceive. Though carrying the inference that the bank failed from its inherent weakness, the writer probably knew, as Richard Ely of Johns Hopkins certainly knew when he made a similar statement in his book on “French and German Socialism,” that such was not at all the real reason of its failure. The bank failed because it never got started, and it never got started (although its prospects were most flattering) because Napoleon III cast Proudhon, its manager, into prison, nominally for a political offence, but really for the express purpose of killing the bank.

A new subscriber in Melbourne, Australia, David A. Andrade, sends the following encouraging word: “I am well satisfied with your paper as far as I have seen it; and I intend diligently to read through the whole file as soon as I can find time, after which I may probably have something to say to you on the subject. I have not yet satisfied myself as to the correctness of your views regarding capital and profit and one of two minor subjects; and I do not feel justified in deciding upon the merits of all your principles until I have read and considered what you have to say on the subject. As regards laws and governments, however, I can say safely that I am at one with you. A freethinker in theory, and as far as possible in practice, I heartily detest the tyrannies of priests and rulers and the contemptible servility of the religious and the loyal. Individualism is the principle which I cherish above all others; and humility I abhor, whether it be in the form of respect for monarchy, republic, aristocracy, democracy, majority rule, minority rule, or what not. Every law I regard as either oppressive or superfluous, every lawmaker either a rogue or a fool.”

The most healthful sign recently exhibited by American daily journalism is the experimental innovation of the Boston “Globe” in adopting in its Sunday edition the French idea of signed editorials. The very first issue established the value of the system, and from it, if the idea is adhered to, may fairly date the advent of honesty into our metropolitan newspaper offices. The “Globe’s” editorial page last Sunday breathed a spirit of fearless and untrammeled sincerity which made it at once superior to itself in the past and to its contemporaries in the present. Even the New York “Sun,” which has achieved the highest degree of independence that impersonal journalism has yet shown itself capable of, must take second place to the “Sunday Globe” in this respect. The “Globe,” however, should beware of the magazine policy of making its editorial page a receptacle for star papers by celebrated writers. Its opportunity for rivalling the magazines is to be found in its “special article” columns. The editorial columns should be filled exclusively by two or three forcible writers, broadly in sympathy on questions of principle and policy, who will discuss from day to day the issues of the hour in such weighty, bright, and vital fashion that their opinions will become, not exactly oracular, but as valuable and interesting to the people as if they were. That is the French idea in its fullness, and it combines the advantages of individuality, originality, and freedom with those of consistency, steady purpose, and cumulative power.

To the Czar of Russia is due the credit of applying practically to taxation the reductio ad absurdum. Heretofore all his subjects have enjoyed at least the highly estimable privilege of praying for their rights free of cost. Any morning any of them could put in as many petitions as they chose to Alexander himself or any of his ministers for relief from any grievance whatsoever. Now, however, this state of things is no more. The last liberty of the Russian has been taken from him. The right of petition has been made the subject of a tax. Before the aggrieved citizen can make his grievance officially known, he must pay sixty kopecks into the treasury of His Imperial Nibs for the purchase of a stamp to put upon his document. Other sovereigns have taxed every other right under the sun, but it was left for Alexander III. to tax the right to demand your rights. No citizen of Russia can now ask his “dear father” to let him alone without paying sixty kopecks an ask. This is the act of a notoriously cruel despot. See now how much wiser the policy of a reputedly benevolent one, Dom Pedro of Brazil. He also is the author of a novelty in taxation. No Brazilian husband, who, becoming suspicious of his wife, detects her and her lover in flagrante delicto, can hereafter legally establish such discovery until he has first poured into the State’s coffers a sum slightly exceeding two dollars and a half. This is a use of tyranny that almost indices me to wink at it. Bleeding domestic tyrants is better business than political tyrants are wont to engage in. If there must be a tax-gatherer, I shall vote for Dom Pedro.

The New York “Graphic” says: “A crank journal in Boston, which calls itself Liberty, takes sides with the Franco-Canadians who refuse to be vaccinated, and advises them to ‘vaccinate the doctors with cold lead.’ If that principle were carried to its logical outcome, it would be criminal to restrain a lunatic or shoot a mad dog.” From the governmental standpoint the “Graphic” is perfectly correct. Governments are blind despots, unable to discriminate between reason and rabies, between liberty and lunacy. Thought is a function of which they know nothing, brains an article of which they cannot take cognizance. To governments and the “Graphic” there is no distinction between Alfred Russell Wallace, the scientist, refusing to be vaccinated, and a mad dog running through the streets. Both should be restrained or shot down. The “crank journal in Boston,” however, sees a difference between them, and would treat them differently. If it is cranky or eccentric to possess this high degree of discriminative power, the fact is a sad one for ordinary people.

M. D. Conway’s address on “Our Armageddon,” delivered at the reception lately given him by the Boston Free Religionists, was the grandest thing that I have heard from one of that school in a long time. The remark of Colonel Higginson, the presiding officer, that Mr. Conway still professed theism seemed hardly borne out by the essayist’s own statements. For although he declared the only article of his confession of faith to be, “God is good,” he went on to explain that his god was not the author of all phenomena, for, since all phenomena are not lovable, no one can worship the author of all phenomena; that his god is not omnipotent, but sometimes almost helpless; that his god did not create the evil that exists, and is not responsible for it; that his god, in short, is simply the goodness to be found in the human heart, which is always doing battle with evil,— a battle which the essayist proceeded to discuss as “our Armageddon.” Such a god is no god at all. Strip God of his omnipotence, his creatorship, and his ruling power, and you take away the divine essentials. Whatever words Mr. Conway may use, his position is that of the atheist. Michael Bakounine himself would not hesitate to stand by his side. And it is among the atheists and Anarchists that Mr. Conway will have chiefly to look for recruits for “our Armageddon.” The Free Religionists whom he addressed listened to him almost without enthusiasm. His glowing words were unable to fuse their enamel of “respectability.” With very rare exceptions these people are upholders of the chief social iniquities of the worst political tyranny. You seldom hear from them a direct and specific word against the monopolies that rob labor (save now and then a protest against the comparatively innocent protective tariff), and the men who do oppose such monopolies they regard as cranks and impracticables. The horrible institution of marriage, which Mr. Conway has dealt so many terrific blows, finds its strictest apologists in the Free Religionists, Colonel Higginson had words of honey for Mr. Conway for upholding old Mr. Truelove when imprisoned in England for his opinions, but Colonel Higginson’s voice was silent when, in this country, E. H. Heywood and D. M. Bennett were imprisoned for their opinions. In fact, I am not sure that it was not lifted in favor of their imprisonment. Ah! Mr. Conway, you have mistaken your hosts.

Ireland!

By Georges Sauton.

Translated from the French for Liberty by Sarah E. Holmes.

Chapter I.

Now Paddy Neill breathed freely again. He travelled no longer in the darkness, like a thief, passing the day crouched in the branches of trees, hid in the bottom of a ravine or in the caves of beasts to escape the English emissaries who were scouring the country.

Neither soldiers nor spies had yet pushed their reconnaissances in this direction, and he no longer dreaded being informed against, as a dangerous Irishman, on account of his run-away garb, his vest in tatters, his breeches spotted with mud, and, above all, his face, frightfully scarred, like the canvas of a torn portrait,— cruel stigmata of the torments which he had suffered the previous month, in the dungeons of Dublin.

He slept during the night, and walked from daybreak, taking the roads or footpaths at his fancy, tending, however, to the shorter, being in haste to reach again his village, in the region of Cork, left nearly a half year since, and to which he brought grave news and instructions.

Ireland fermented from one end to the other, perturbed at many points; already the people were rising in arms, announcing themselves “formidable.” The poor old woman, as her children sadly called Ireland, lived yet, showing her teeth, and soon would set them in the pitiless heart of these cursed tyrants. The atrocity of the preventive repression did not dismay her.

In the name of George the Fourth, they had in vain multiplied tortures, the whip, the stake, summoning to the thresholds of their houses and shooting without warning peaceful citizens, putting caps of pitch on the heads of suspected parsons: these savage proceedings succeeding only in kindling the spirit of the lukewarm, and in exasperating the more ardent.

The cap of pitch had been Paddy’s fate, and he counted absolutely on the ignoble ravages of his face to revolutionize every man down there at Bunclody and in all the country where they knew him; he doubted only one thing,— the not being disfigured enough to excite sufficient wrath; so he was devoured by curiosity to get to his hut and see himself in the bit of looking-glass ornamented with the green Shamrock leaf and hung in the chimney corner under the colored image of Saint Patrick.

Since he had left, the hands of the torturer, traversing no village in his flight, systematically avoiding habitations, he had seen neither glass nor window, and, having met no living soul whose degree of fright had informed him, he could not at all render to himself an account of his condition. The only cottage he had entered (being thirsty) was wholly without panes to the windows which shook in the wind; and, more than three-quarters blind, the old octogenarian who was mechanically knitting within, judging him by the mildness of his words, had experienced neither terror nor repulsion.

Feeling his scars with his hand, he fully realized that the pitch, in fusing, had corroded and shred his eyelids, cutting the skin of the forehead; his fingers penetrated into the sinuous furrows and pressed the swellings of the flesh; but he could not picture adequately to himself the whole of these horrors, and he deviated sometimes from his path in search of a spring or brook which would reflect his image.

He discovered none, the unusually hot summer having dried up the water as it had consumed the foliage of the trees and devoured the grass of the meadows, casting desolation over all the country.

Tired at last, Paddy leaned against the side of a knoll and looked on at scenes of real tragedies.

Miserable cows, in a pasture without a shadow of vegetation, turned towards the pale autumnal sun their noses parched with fever. Yawning with hunger, pushing back parched lips over their long, yellow, shaking teeth, they exhaled lamentable lowings like a doleful appeal for help, to which, at last, responded the far-away voice of a man. Aroused by the noise, one beast, more consumptive than the rest, made an heroic effort, to rise, accompanied by a grievous lamentation, only to tremble and almost immediately drop down, exhausted, on the soil arid and naked as an empty sack.

The others, doubtless aware of this fall, redoubled their bellowing; and the man whose voice — gently encouraging in spite of the characteristic accent of sorrow — drew nearer, appeared behind the slashed hedge, where now not even the skeleton of a leaf remained. The animals ran to him at a panting trot of their feeble legs, the flabby hide flapping on their hollow flanks, but, immediately wearied, they slackened their speed, proceeding with a painful gait. They surrounded him affectionately, licking the hands which caressed their rough and withered hide.

A sharp sadness seized the countryman; by turns he contemplated the dull stretch of meadow, bare as a cloth that shows its thread, and the knotty spines and skeleton frames of the cows whose bones showed with such painful sharpness.

“Would it not be better to kill them at once?” murmured he, loud enough, however, for Neill, in the silence of this solitude, to understand.

He appeared himself emaciated by privations; and, very gloomy, powerless to alleviate this deplorable distress, he hastened the denouement, exciting by some deceptive words the dying animal to stand on her feet, helping her with a supreme goodness; then slipped a leather strap under her belly, so supporting her in her unsteady step; and together they left the field.

Here also misery allied itself with the English. Paddy had hoped that it would be otherwise; but, since the evil existed, he believed that this complication would hasten the insurrection; the famine would come sooner, and the wolf more readily spring from the forest.

Having again set out on his way and passing by the side of the enclosure, the cows which were left, bellowing their desolation in a despairing rhythm, came towards him. Whether by chance or because he was a stranger to them, when they saw him at their side, they stopped suddenly as if stupefied. He attributed their attitude to horror, and went on his way, enchanted.

Decidedly, he would produce on his friends a strong impression, and, to enjoy as soon as possible this result, he lengthened his steps, regretting his pause and rest which had delayed him. By taking short cuts he calculated to reach the end of his journey in five good hours by wasting no time, never stopping to stare at the rooks which in black hands flew swiftly cawing toward the regions where the murderers strewed the pavements of the streets with corpses.

Barely four hours and a half sufficed, and he reached Bunclody as the setting sun encircled the top of the steeple from which the Angelus had just finished sounding.

The country nearer the sea, refreshed by its humid breath, had suffered less from the drought than most of the other regions: it preserved yet some green thickets, and an appearance of harvest, very incompletely ripened, waved in the breeze, balancing on the ears of corn a multitude of sparrows that were stuffing themselves, regardless of the immoderate gestures of manikins rigged upon poles.

These represented vague types of the English, and the timid attempts at rough caricature pleased Paddy Neill, who smiled.

They had not, since Iris departure, lost their hatred of the oppressor; quite the contrary, as he received proof some minutes later.

The last vibrations of the Angelus died away in an imperceptible hum as a murmuring, rumbling sound of voices readied him: voices of youths, delicate but positive, at intervals suddenly grave with solemn inflections, or as if stifled in their throats, breaking forth unexpectedly in irritated exclamations.

“The truant school of Treor!” said Paddy to himself, and in his heart, surged spontaneously the memory of his forgotten childhood.

He ran over his twenty-seven years, and again it was Treor who, in the shade of the flowering hedges, on the cool river banks, had instructed himself and his comrades in rebellion against the law, the odious law which forbade the sons of Erin to read elsewhere than in the Anglican catechism.

Going by the side of the road, in the field within the thorny fence, they did not see him approach; the sound of his steps deadened by the fallow ground, he drew near without, betraying his presence, and through the network of brandies perceived a dozen young boys, the sons and brothers of his old schoolfellows, grouped by the side of a ditch around the proud old man; while a little farther on, his little girl Marian, a sweet and serene face, taught the younger ones, those of five or six years.

With eyes opened wide at the recitals of the master, the older ones read the lesson on his lips before hearing it, and, shuddering, their clear foreheads contracted, they seemed in the strong anger which swelled their breasts already like men.

Most assuredly, Treor was speaking to them of their country, of her ruins, her sufferings, her griefs, and her bondage, and in this way rousing their generous, exuberant emotion, Neill listened.

“Then,” said the volunteer tutor, “Cromwell, having found in Drogheda a fierce resistance, burned the town relentlessly.”

A pale little fellow, with the veined face of a sickly girl, cried out, in a hissing voice:

“At least, he is for all eternity in the flames of hell!”

“After which,” continued the old man, “the Protector tried to sell the whole of Ireland, at auction, to the Jews!”

“The Judas!” exclaimed a patriot of thirteen years, with a blazing face.

And all the pupils, in a noisy uproar and confusion of questions, begged for enlightenment on points still obscure to them. Treor, probably for the hundredth time, retraced for them in a rapid resume the whole history of the contest undertaken by the rapacious Albion: her lords joining in a scramble for the land, building their castles on the battle-fields still drenched with blood mixed with crushed flesh; at the least, manifestation of discontent on the part of the conquered, depriving them of all chance of retaliation, all hope of an equitable restoration in the future, by exile en masse, transportation en masse, massacres, slaughter of inoffensive populations, veritable unclean butcheries with only incendiary fires everywhere to purify the air!

“At last,” concluded Treor, who was growing enthusiastic amid the increasing tumult of hearts, “they soon drove all the natives from the right bank of the Shannon as if they were penning up a flock, and the fate of whoever ventured there was death, death without sentence, the unpunished, applauded death of game by the hunter! The adage with which you are familiar is borne out by experience and the height of the hecatombs: ‘It is not a felony to kill an Irishman!’”

During this time, the teaching of the little ones, calmer but yet patriot like, was going on, and, to repay them for their sustained attention, the young teacher repeated to them the always applauded legend of Ireland surviving, like the ark, the deluge; and of her inhabitants, rescued from the waters, repeopling afterwards the neighboring islands.

And the marvellous legend provoked this logical reflection from an infant as chubby as the cherubs in church paintings:

“In that case, it is England that ought to belong to us.”

Slow and melancholy, the speech of the young girl seemed to disengage itself from the midst of tears; her whole look breathed intense grief, restrained and forced back, and the oblique rays of the sun which was disappearing kindled a faint light in her wet eyes. Paddy Neill remarked at the same time, in the neighborhood, a castle window illuminated by the same sun, and this chance coincidence recalled to him what he believed to have discovered before his departure,— the love of Treor’s little girl for the son of Newington, deceitful, fatal love, without issue, devoted to sorrow, reprobation, and despair.

Sir Richard Bradwell, who was its object, was as forbearing and humane, as his father was harsh and hateful to the Irish, but he belonged none the less to the odious race, and the sons of hangmen do not marry without profanation and sacrilege the daughters or sisters of their victims.

So Neill exulted once more in the thought of his mutilations; when Marian should see him, when he should explain to her in detail the torments, the refined atrocities, of the torturers, it would be impossible that she should keep for one single instant longer her heart’s passion for a man speaking the same language as the wretches who commanded these tortures or the brutes who executed them.

To listen to the words, “I love you,” pronounced with the accent of the beings who were guilty of such atrocities,— no, Paddy could not admit that Marian, so tender, so delicate, could tolerate even the thought.

He formulated his opinion to himself, but with such warmth that some words escaped him, and two or three children, turning their heads, saw him, and, uttering screams of fright, trembling, livid, took refuge in Marian’s skirt. She sprang up, pale, haggard, horrified, and stood quite motionless, her lips half open, without articulation, no sound whatever issuing, her look riveted on the apparition by an unconquerable force, the fascination of the hideous.

Repenting the trouble he had caused, which exceeded all his previsions and calculations, Paddy advanced in order to make himself known to her and to reassure her; but, at the first step, she threw herself backward, all at once, like a statue from its pedestal; and, as he sprang forward to support her or to lift her, the hand of Treor, who had run with his young pupils, grasped him nervously by the back of his neck, brutally hurled him to the earth, and sent him rolling away.

At the same time the most hot-headed of the old man’s scholars flung themselves on him to secure him and bring him to justice. But, while struggling, he succeeded in announcing himself: “Paddy Neill, the cartwright, son of the dead Mat Neill,” and he made a comic explanation of Marian’s accident.

“The English have scalded me like a calf; the sight took her breath away, I beg pardon for it. I ought not to have shown myself without warning.”

“It is his voice, let him go!” said Treor, who, encircling his daughter’s waist with his arm, was supporting her inert body on his knee bent on the ground.

He pressed his cheek against her mouth, watching the faint breath that showed it to be a simple fainting fit. The children, gathered in a group, elbow to elbow, stared, petrified, at this monster who had suddenly risen up as if vomited by the soil; and he himself, as if he had seen Medusa’s head, could not remove his gaze from this cranium of a skeleton, naked and dazzling; from this death-dance mask, where the new flesh of the forehead and nose displayed itself by repellent whitish spots, like the juice of a poisonous herb; where, without lashes, the ball of the eye, streaked with blood, appeared a disgusting, living sore.

And, surely, the worst of all was in the contrast between such deformity and the strength of the face which now tried to correct its expression by mildness.

Marian gave sign of life; sighs mingled with feeble wails came from her breast, her jaws parted, she tried to draw breath, moving her hand from the painfully contracted heart to the swollen neck where the tension of the muscles gave her the feeling of strangling.

Paddy understood that, recovering her senses, she ought not to find herself vis-a-vis with the same phantasmagorical image, and he widened his mouth in a smile which, disclosing formidable rows of enormous teeth, became the summit of ghastliness: the nose of a dog, of a flayed wolf that laughs.

Faith, he should have taken himself off! His good sense told him that, but, stupefied by the incident he had occasioned, confused by the clamors of the countrymen who ran up, he had not the energy.

They shook spades, mattocks, and pitchforks at him, covering him with abuse, without knowing it; the women picked up stones to pelt him. Treor, calling out to them who he was, saved him from blows and mortal injury, and the unfortunate man inwardly exulted in the discomfiture of the chance comers.

Paddy Neill! this spectre, this vision from another world, was this Jesus possible? And most of them doubted, examined him with distrust, recognizing him not by any vestige of his features, but rather by some peculiarity of his clothes, in spite of their rags and the dirt that covered them. The women seemed shocked; then, letting their arms fall, they stiffened into tearful attitudes, standing straight as stumps, exclaiming, “My God! My God!” till satisfied. They rattled off harangues, certain ones adding a lamentation, “What a misfortune!” remembering the Paddy Neill of old, with skin fine and smooth as a girl’s, laughing, sparkling eyes, and such a merry temper!

“Paddy! . . . Paddy!” . . . came in a stifled whisper from a pleasant, rosy-cheeked gossip of twenty years, Nelly Pernell.

Not long before she had been suspected of having deceived her husband, to Neill’s advantage, a short time after her marriage; but by chance had escaped slander. Wan and bloodless, she stood there with folded hands, the fingers clenched so tightly that they cracked; with an admirable naivete and exceeding candor of remorse seeking confusedly and stammeringly for words with which to ask of her lover a pardon she dared not hope. She had provoked Paddy to court her and had yielded readily, ardently desiring her fall. Heaven’s punishment ought then rather to have fallen on her.

Now she, reflected also on all the possible, dreadful consequences of her fault. Imagine that she had conceived a child of sin! Instantly, because of the shock which she had received, the scars of the father would be imprinted on the face of the little being! She kept herself on her feet by a miraculous effort, struck with a sort of mental paralysis, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, yet because of those present keeping herself from falling like Marian. Marian had the right to faint, being innocent.

Recovered from their first repulsion, the comrades of the disfigured man crowded around him affectionately, fraternally, and seized his hands, growling vehemently about the authors of these outrages, those damned Saxons. And they menacingly shook their fists in the direction of England, gradually lifting them higher and higher as they were made familiar with the history.

Having bound him, arms, thighs, and ankles, the ruffians, four or five in number, bent his head between the knees of the torturer, and shaved his hair nearly off. Then, the steel having surely and unceremoniously notched the skin, while he, blinded by the flow of blood, asphyxiated, snorted wildly, the cap filled with boiling pitch was clapped down over his ears. Ah! ah! the smart of the razor lasted no longer.

He was interrupted by vociferations and outcries; throbs like an inward rain of intolerable sufferings permeated the flesh of the women, who felt under their own hair the cold and cut of the steel. With widely dilated eyes, the children, even the little ones, with their extraordinary gift and power of imagination, discerned through space and time the living scene of torment.

Seeing them so violently moved, they wished to send them away. Paddy, to spare them, ceased his story, but they drew themselves back that they might not be led away and begged him to go on, calling out greedily:

“What then? what then? tell us. We must have vengeance!”

Neill hesitated, then answered negatively, promising the conclusion later when their excitement should be lessened; in a few days, perhaps tomorrow.

But, with a great tumult, they set themselves against all delay.

“No: immediately! Go on!”

“Then?” urged one, who was dying of impatience.

“Finish, then!” added another.

“Yes, finish!” said a voice, pressing and imperious, that rose above the general uproar.

They looked round: it was Marian, readjusting her unfastened dress, and coiling up her hair, which had fallen during her fainting fit.

Neither melancholy nor fright remained longer on her face, but in their place only determination, an inexorable will to know all.

She scrutinized without swooning and with increasing pity Paddy’s poor grimacing face, the sores badly healed in places; and an immeasurable indignation took possession of her, body and soul, against the authors of this nameless crime!

“Finish!” she reiterated, in a voice doubly strong and peremptory.

Still Neill hesitated. He interrogated the silent Treor, who nodded assent.

“The end!” continued he then, “the end, heavens! it is very simple. The pitch, cooling, shaping itself to the skull, stuck well. Ugh! they took off the cap and the skin with it and the flesh with it; the bones would have followed if they had not been well fastened in.”

The men swore, and, among the women, almost the whole village being collected there, arose a kind of howl, a prolonged rattle exhumed from the depths of their hearts; their commiseration doubling, as it had done before, in proportion to the physical sensation of the torments described.

Under their hair, from the neck to the eyebrows, they all experienced absolutely the atrocious impression of a brutal tearing off of their own skin, their own flesh. This personal agony calmed, they related to each other the sensations they had experienced, told of the cold sweat which still ran down their backs and over their skin parched as by a violent fever. Then they exchanged reflections on the event which had come to this unfortunate boy. Next followed their comments — analogous or contradictory, timid or angry, according to the temperament of each — on the results which would ensue.

The majority demanded instant retaliation, returning like for like, implacably; they would take it in hand, would show themselves more furious than the men. The timid foresaw the work of vengeance and that they would not be the stronger party. What would follow? They would expiate their revolt with unspeakable chastisements; cottages demolished, conflagrations everywhere, people basely killed, disemboweled, women, old people, children, without distinction, the whole history taught them by Treor, all that they had themselves seen these two years, all which had been practised in various sections of the country since the terrible year of ’96.

But all these wasted their preaching; they were only interrupted and forbidden to reply.

Edith Arklow, a woman of fifty years, gloomy and restless, drying the tears she had been silently shedding, said a few plain things in favor of action.

“My son Michael is a little younger than Paddy Neill; not much, a few months. They have drafted him into the English army, and sent him to India. Being an Irishman, they molest him, torment him perhaps. Who knows if I shall ever see him again? He might cry out sometime: ‘Long live Ireland!’ in the presence of his general, before the gun-barrels levelled at him. When Paddy was telling of his tortures, it seemed to you that you suffered them yourselves. For me, I imagined that it was my child, my Michael, who endured. So my mind is for revenge.”

Marian applauded her warmly; but a poor neighbor warned the mother of her imprudence; the enemy held him as hostage, this son whose memory she was invoking. And, disconcerted, struggling between her generosity and her dread, Edith grew silent, bathed in new tears, suddenly dried by the fire of this agonizing thought:

Michael, ordered out to be killed; a dozen balls in his breast, in his dear face, breaking his bones, all this because of the advice she had been giving.

Among the men, a similar debate was going on as to the course to be adopted; Treor, whom she called to the rescue, and Paddy were the only ones who counselled delay. The mass, with a unanimous voice, demanded that they act and that they should begin by an immediate march on the castle, talking of blazing the fir trees which shaded it, like a forest of wax-tapers around edifices transformed into cenotaphs.

“Not at all! not at all!” insisted Paddy Neill; and Treor argued that this would only be to incur inevitable defeat, a most disheartening failure, and compromise the general movement which was in preparation.

They refused to listen, molested them turbulently, and made objections, twenty at a time. They declared that, on the contrary, this daring example would drag the reluctant by its contagion, and that the initiative work of vengeance, of liberation, would constitute an eternal glory for the men of Bunclody.

In presence of this undisciplined blindness of courage, Paddy decided to disclose his mission, but, disliking to unfold it so publicly, he lowered his voice, saying:

“I have orders for us to wait.”

To be continued.

A Letter to Grover Cleveland:

On

His False, Absurd, Self-Contradictory, and Ridiculous Inaugural Address.

By Lysander Spooner.

[The author reserves his copyright in this letter.]

Section XIII.

In still another way, the government denies men’s natural right to life. And that is by denying their natural right to make any of those contracts with each other, for buying and selling, borrowing and lending, giving and receiving, property, which are necessary, if men are to exist in any considerable numbers on the earth.

Even the few savages, who contrive to live, mostly or wholly, by hunting, fishing, and gathering wild fruits, without cultivating the earth, and almost wholly without the use of tools or machinery, are yet, at times, necessitated to buy and sell, borrow and lend, give and receive, articles of food, if no others, as their only means of preserving their lives. But, in civilized life, where but a small portion of men’s labor is necessary for the production of food, and they employ themselves in an almost infinite variety of industries, and in the production of an almost infinite variety of commodities, it would be impossible for them to live, if they were wholly prohibited from buying and selling, borrowing and lending, giving and receiving, the products of each other’s labor.

Yet the government of the United States — either acting separately, or jointly with the State governments — has heretofore constantly denied, and still constantly denies, the natural right of the people, as individuals, to make their own contracts, for such buying and selling, borrowing and lending, and giving and receiving, such commodities as they produce for each other’s uses.

I repeat that both the national and State governments have constantly denied the natural right of individuals to make their own contracts. They have done this, sometimes by arbitrarily forbidding them to make particular contracts, and sometimes by arbitrarily qualifying the obligations of particular contracts, when the contracts themselves were naturally and intrinsically as just and lawful as any others that men ever enter into; and were, consequently, such as men have as perfect a natural right to make, as they have to make any of those contracts which they are permitted to make.

The laws arbitrarily prohibiting, or arbitrarily qualifying, certain contracts, that are naturally and intrinsically just and lawful, are so numerous, and so well known, that they need not all be enumerated here. But any and all such prohibitions, or qualifications, are a denial of men’s natural right to make their own contracts. They are a denial of men’s right to make any contracts whatever, except such as the governments shall see fit to permit them to make.

It is the natural right of any and all human beings, who are mentally competent to make reasonable contracts, to make any and every possible contract, that is naturally and intrinsically just and honest, for buying and selling, borrowing and lending, giving and receiving, any and all possible commodities, that are naturally vendible, loanable, and transferable, and that any two or more individuals may, at any time, without force or fraud, choose to buy and sell, borrow and lend, give and receive, of and to each other.

And it is plainly only by the untrammelled exercise of this natural right, that all the loanable capital, that is required by men’s industries, can be lent and borrowed, or that all the money can be supplied for the purchase and sale of that almost infinite diversity and amount of commodities, that men are capable of producing, and that are to be transferred from the hands of the producers to those of the consumers.

But the government of the United States — and also the governments of the States — utterly deny the natural right of any individuals whatever to make any contracts whatever, for buying and selling, borrowing and lending, giving and receiving, any and all such commodities, as are naturally vendible, loanable, and transferable, and as the producers and consumers of such commodities may wish to buy and sell, borrow and lend, give and receive, of and to each other.

These governments (State and national) deny this natural right of buying and selling, etc., by arbitrarily prohibiting, or qualifying, all such, and so many, of these contracts, as they choose to prohibit, or qualify.

The prohibition, or qualification, of any one of these contracts — that are intrinsically just and lawful — is a denial of all individual natural right to make any of them. For the right to make any and all of them stands on the same grounds of natural law, natural justice, and men’s natural rights. If a government has the right to prohibit, or qualify, any one of these contracts, it has the same right to prohibit, or qualify, all of them. Therefore the assertion, by the government, of a right to prohibit, or qualify, any one of them, is equivalent to a denial of all natural right, on the part of individuals, to make any of them.

The power that has been thus usurped by governments, to arbitrarily prohibit or qualify all contracts that are naturally and intrinsically just and lawful, has been the great, perhaps the greatest, of all the instrumentalities, by which, in this, as in other countries, nearly all the wealth, accumulated by the labor of the many, has been, and is now, transferred into the pockets of the few.

It is by this arbitrary power over contracts, that the monopoly of money is sustained. Few people have any real perception of the power, which this monopoly gives to the holders of it, over the industry and traffic of all other persons. And the one only purpose of the monopoly is to enable the holders of it to rob everybody else in the prices of their labor, and the products of their labor.

The theory, on which the advocates of this monopoly attempt to justify it, is simply this: That it is not at all necessary that money should be a bona fide equivalent of the labor or property that is to be bought with it; that if the government will but specially license a small amount of money, and prohibit all other money, the holders of the licensed money will then be able to buy with it the labor and property of all other persons for a half, a tenth, a hundredth, a thousandth, or a millionth, of what such labor and property are really and truly worth.

David A. Wells, one of the most prominent — perhaps at this time, the most prominent — advocate of the monopoly, in this country, states the theory thus:

A three-cent piece, if it could be divided into a sufficient number of pieces, with each piece capable of being handled, would undoubtedly suffice for doing all the business of the country in the way of facilitating exchanges, if no other better instrumentality was available. — New York Herald, February 13, 1875.

He means here to say, that “a three-cent piece” contains as much real, true, and natural market value, as it would be necessary that all the money of the country should have, if the government would but prohibit all other money; that is, if the government, by its arbitrary legislative power, would but make all other and better money unavailable.

And this is the theory, on which John Locke, David Hume, Adam Smith, David Ricardo, J. R. McCulloch, and John Stuart Mill, in England, and Amasa Walker, Charles H. Carroll, Hugh McCulloch, in this country, and all the other conspicuous advocates of the monopoly, both in this country and in England, have attempted to justify it. They have all held that it was not necessary that money should be a bona fide equivalent of the labor or property to be bought with it; but that, by the prohibition of all other money, the holders of a comparatively worthless amount of licensed money would be enabled to buy, at their own prices, the labor and property of all other men.

And this is the theory on which the governments of England and the United States have always, with immaterial exceptions, acted, in prohibiting all but such small amounts of money as they (the governments) should specially license. And it is the theory upon which they act now. And it is so manifestly a theory of pure robbery, that scarce a word can be necessary to make it more evidently so than it now is.

But inasmuch as your mind seems to be filled with the wildest visions of the excellency of this government, and to be strangely ignorant of its wrongs; and inasmuch as this monopoly of money is, in its practical operation, one of the greatest — possibly the greatest — of all these wrongs, and the one that is most relied upon for robbing the great body of the people, and keeping them in poverty and servitude, it is plainly important that you should have your eyes opened on the subject. I therefore submit, for your consideration, the following self-evident propositions:

1. That to make all traffic just and equal, it is indispensable that, in each separate purchase and sale, the money paid should be a bona fide equivalent of the labor or property bought with it.

Dare you, or any other man, of common sense and common honesty, dispute the truth of that proposition? If not, let us consider that principle established. It will then serve as one of the necessary and infallible guides to the true settlement of all the other questions that remain to be settled.

2. That so long as no force or fraud is practised by either party, the parties themselves, to each separate contract, have the sole, absolute, and unqualified right to decide for themselves, what money, and how much of it, shall be considered a bona fide equivalent of the labor or property that is to be exchanged for it. All this is necessarily implied in the natural right of men to make their own contracts, for buying and selling their respective commodities.