when oppressed. You would have made heroes out of them. Have you no soul
left, after admiring the rebels in your own history, to sympathize with
other rebels suffering deeper wrongs? Can you not see deeper into the
motives for rebellion than the hireling reporter who is sent to make
up a case for the paper of a party? The best men in Ulster, the best
Unionists in Ireland will not be grateful to you for libeling their
countrymen in your verse. For, let the truth be known, the mass of Irish
Unionists are much more in love with Ireland than with England. They
think Irish Nationalists are mistaken, and they fight with them and
use hard words, and all the time they believe Irishmen of any party are
better in the sight of God than Englishmen. They think Ireland is the
best country in the world to live in, and they hate to hear Irish people
spoken of as murderers and greedy scoundrels. Murderers! Why, there is
more murder done in any four English shires in a year than in the whole
of the four provinces of Ireland! Greedy! The nation never accepted a
bribe, or took it as an equivalent or payment for an ideal, and what
bribe would not have been offered to Ireland if it had been willing to
forswear its traditions.

I am a person whose whole being goes into a blaze at the thought
of oppression of faith, and yet I think my Catholic countrymen more
tolerant than those who hold the faith I was born in. I am a heretic
judged by their standards, a heretic who has written and made public his
heresies, and I have never suffered in friendship or found my heresies
an obstacle in life. I set my knowledge, the knowledge of a lifetime,
against your ignorance, and I say you have used your genius to do
Ireland and its people a wrong. You have intervened in a quarrel of
which you do not know the merits like any brawling bully, who passes,
and only takes sides to use his strength. If there was a high court of
poetry, and those in power jealous of the noble name of poet, and that
none should use it save those who were truly Knights of the Holy Ghost,
they would hack the golden spurs from your heels and turn you out of the
Court. You had the ear of the world and you poisoned it with prejudice
and ignorance. You had the power of song, and you have always used it
on behalf of the strong against the weak. You have smitten with all your
might at creatures who are frail on earth but mighty in the heavens,
at generosity, at truth, at justice, and heaven h