eady to die; and we
believed them. We believe them still. Aye, do we! They did not go to
meet their God with a falsehood on their lips. On that night before
their execution, oh, what a scene! What a picture did England present
at the foot of the Manchester scaffold! The brutal populace thronged
thither in tens of thousands. They danced; they sang; they
blasphemed; they chorused "Rule Britannia," and "God save the Queen,"
by way of taunt and defiance of the men whose death agonies they had
come to see! Their shouts and brutal cries disturbed the doomed
victims inside the prison as in their cells they prepared in prayer
and meditation to meet their Creator and their God. Twice the police
had to remove the crowd from around that wing of the prison; so that
our poor brothers might in peace go through their last preparations
for eternity, undisturbed by the yells of the multitude outside. Oh,
gentlemen, gentlemen--that scene! That scene in the grey cold
morning when those innocent men were led out to die--to die an
ignominious death before that wolfish mob! With blood on fire--with
bursting hearts--we read the dreadful story here in Ireland. We knew
that these men would never have been thus sacrificed had not their
offence been political, and had it not been that in their own way
they represented the old struggle of the Irish race. We felt that if
time had but been permitted for English passion to cool down, English
good feeling and right justice would have prevailed; and they never
would have been put to death on such a verdict. All this we felt, yet
we were silent till we heard the press that had hounded those men to
death falsely declaring that our silence was acquiescence in the deed
that consigned them to murderers' graves. Of this I have personal
knowledge, that, here in Dublin at least, nothing was done or
intended, until the _Evening Mail_ declared that popular feeling
which had had ample time to declare itself, if it felt otherwise,
quite recognised the justice of the execution. Then we resolved to
make answer. Then Ireland made answer. For what monarch, the loftiest
in the world, would such demonstrations be made, the voluntary
offerings of a people's grief! Think you it was "sympathy for murder"
called us forth, or caused the priests of the Catholic Church to
drape their churches? It is a libel to utter the base