Evening Memories

New Zealand Tablet, Volume L, Issue 5, 1 February 1923, Page 7

Evening Memories

(By William O’Brien.)

CHAPTER XVlll.(Continued.)

The month between the sentence and its confirmation on appeal must-be skipped over, crammed though it was with events stirring enough, such as three new prosecutions against me in the Dublin Police Courts, in which the tables were victoriously turned by Mr. Healy; the interview of Mr. Dillon and myself with Monsignor Persico, the Papal Envoy and a series of insuppressible suppressed ” meetings on the fighting estates, the final triumph of which was the first of the midnight meetings, when the Lord Lieutenant’s proclamation was publicly burnt in Woodford,-and Mr. Wilfrid' Blunt gave Mr. Balfour his revenge by a prosecution of which more hereafter. The month was spent in winding the country up to an open and scornful defiance of Coercion in all its pitiful shapes during the three months after I should have disappeared.

Two incidents of the last scene must not be omitted. A procession several miles long accompanied John Mandeville and myself to the Appeal Court at Midleton. When the proceedings commenced a. telegram was handed to the Crown Solicitor, and was long and anxiously debated between Mr. Carson and himself. One of our innumerable friends in the Telegraph Service had got hold of the Government cypher and concocted a telegram from the famous Sergeant Peter O’Brien in Dublin, instructing Mr. Carson for urgent reasons which would be duly communicated to him to have the appeal adjourned to the next Sessions —a respite of three months. It would have been an immense joke, and it is now clear the Crown Council would have fallen without suspicion into the booby-trap. I had not been apprised of the design and spoiled the fun, while Mr. Carson was still painfully interpreting the cypher, by standing up to announce that I would take no further part in the proceedings, and proposed to quit the Court pending the completion of formalities. This, I was advised, was perfectly admissible according to the wording of the Act, and so the Recorder, who presided, declared; but the Removable Magistrate in commanda burly military man named Stokes jumped madly on the witness table flourishing a heavy oak stick about his head, shouted that he would not let me leave the Court, whatever the law or the Recorder might say, and straightway provoked a riot between the police and the people, in which I was sufficiently rejoiced with this spectacle of the Coercion bullies in open insurrection against the law to submit with an excellent grace to be dragged back before I could reach the thousands of excited people surging around the Courthouse.

The last touch was supplied on our transfer to Cork gaol by road in the midst of an escort of Hussars. We rode in a two-horse carriage in the company of the County Inspector of Police and one of his subalterns, and a miscellaneous cavalcade, of horsemen and cars of all descriptions galloped wildly in the rear. It was only as we neared Cork that we realised that the chargers of the hussars had quickened their pace to a gallop, and that our unfortunate coach horses were being flogged to a pace never rivalled outside the pages of Lever. We noticed also that a- light trap driven by the Mayor of Cork, Alderman John O’Brien, was by this time engaged in a steeplechase with our escort, and was threatening to pass us on the road at full gallop. We were not long in surmising the explanation. A couple of miles from Cork, at Dunkettle, an. opening bridge spans the road, and Mayor John O’Brien was racing to be first across the swing bridge in time to life it and leave the Hussars and their prisoners on the wrong side of a yawning gulf of Waters. For the last half mile the pace became so terrific I expected every moment our unfortunate steeds would drop and die in the shafts, but at the last a charge of the rearguard brought the Mayor’s gallant chase to a standstill, and the troop of Hussars was v safely across the swing bridge, their horses dead beat, but themselves chortling with victory. And so, on to our destination at the gaol gates whore, as usual, an affectionate shower of stones fired as it were Rebel Cork’s last volley over the bodies of .their, departed comrades. > '

One trait more to put us in a better humor with human nature. The next day the Captain in charge, of the Hussar escort called to the gaol to leave his card for me, and the Governor of the gaol, Major Roberts, brought it to me

with the air of one who was risking his neck —or, what was the same thing, his place—to do his. prisoner the courtesy. Wonderful old land of ours! Well may the bard sing—

Here’s dear old Ireland, brave old Ireland,

" Ireland boys, hurrah! ' CHAPTER XIX.—“TULLAMORE” (1887). The struggle by which all Mr. Balfour’s prison plans were finally broken and thrown to the winds was concerned only in a subsidiary degree with the personal privations of his prisoners. It was primarily resolved upon as a means of prolonging the resistance to coercion after imprisonment in a way more damaging to the Coercionists than the activity outside for which the imprisonment took place, and thus reducing the infamous penal code to a nullity as well as condemning its ministers to the reprobation of civilised men. His every official act confirmed the revelation at Clouds of the Chief Secretary’s programme. It was to treat his political prisoners not better but worse than the most heinous of common criminals since they were better educated and their motives did not matter, and to degrade them because he believed they would feel the degradation, and to laugh away their protest with jibes and sneers, the calculation being that the chief among them being men of delicate physique, they would speedily wilt under his stings .and thumbscrews, and make his political victory secure. But that was precisely the challenge on which we elected to close with him, viz.the essential justice of our acts, and the refusal to attorn in tho smallest particular to his claim that he was dealing not with the elected representatives of a nation, but with criminals deserving rather viler treatment than the pickpocket or the wife-beater. The more injudicious the levity with which he appealed to Caesar on that issue, the better worth while it seemed at any hazard to take him at his word.

That there might be no room for misconception, the precise particulars of how I proposed to handle Mr. Balfour’s prison rules were set forth in a public interview while I was awaiting trial in Cork Gaol. The mere hardships attending imprisonment— unpalatable food, the plank bed and so onwere fairly part of the regime, and would be cheerfully accepted. The hunger strike of after years savored for me rather of materialism than of idealism. To ground a national protest upon the quality of the prison fare would have been in my eyes as grotesque as if the demand were for chicken and champagne, and to refuse the means of existence altogether might be open to the reproach of being a particularly indefensible form of suicide. We warred only against Mr. Balfour’s wiful determination to degrade his prisoners into criminals, and that not even through motives of personal susceptibility but because the question whether he was right in his contention involved the question of the justice or guilt of our cause and must consequently decide the entire issue between the two countries. The three instruments of prison treatment which were devised to stamp the prisoners of the Coercion Act with the criminal brand were —prison garb, menial prison tasks, and enrolment in the class of common law convicts in the matter of joint exercise, servile salutes to officials and so forth. As to each of the three, I gave fair notice that I should decline to wear the prison uniform for criminals, to perform any , menial office whatsoever required of criminals, or to be associated with criminals at exercise or in any other disciplinary parade. This was undeniably to propose to break Mr. Balfour’s prison rules to fragments, or to be brokena trial of strength which was, no doubt, as little promising, if one may mention small things in the same breath with great, as the hope of Prometheus to be delivered from the tooth of the vulture on his rock of Mount Caucasus. But it seemed to me clear then, as indeed it turned out, that nothing except a .failure to be as good as my word could prevent the conflict from eventuating in the paralysis of tho Coercion regime and an overwhelming revulsion of feeling in England.

(To bo continued.)

Countless numbers are deceived in multiplying prayers. I would rather say five words devoutly with my heart than five, thousand words which my soul does not relish with affection, and understanding. What a man repeats by his mouth, that let him feel in his soul.— St. Edmund, B.C.