The Irish republic. [volume] (Chicago, Ill.) 1867-18??, 1867-07-06
Liberty.

Among all nations, and at all times, blessed with
a reasonable share of intelligence, the goddess
whom we call Liberty has had her worshippers.
She marched with Moses through the wilderness,
and camped with Washington in Valley Forge.
She saw Leonidas perish at Thermopyla, and she
waved the tri.color at the fall of the Bastile. Dy
nasties have appeared, whose grandeur awed the
world. Temples have arisen whose foundations
were to be immortal. Oblivion has closed her por-
tails the last representative of the one, and the
temples are strewn along the earth, their halls
choked with the desert sands. Yet Liberty, that
was chained to the cars of those long forgotten
kings, and dungeoned beneath the feet of their stony
GODS has risen above their RUM and moves through
the earth the beloved of the peoples. Tyrannies,
spiritual and temporal have conspired for her des-
truction. But she has driven her war chariots
through the divinity that hedged kings" and
dispeed with her torch of truth the "awful mys-
teries' beneath whose sombre shades the devil
was worshipped in the name of God. Her halls
of state are sunless cells. Her life is traced on
dungeon walls. Her shrine is the freeman's heart;
her throne the scafold, along whose crimson steps
her feet have rung as God called her up for coro-
nation.
She has been outlawed by kings; and priests
have cried, Let her be anathema." From chapel
affairs she has been con ured up to fright the rural
flock, until she stands red capped and wild-fre
in her eye, and white foam on her lips-her loose
hair streaming on the wind, like kissing serpents-
one foot on the broken chain, the other tyrants
breast-her left hand holds the torch of liberty her
right the avenging sword, whose crimson dew
falls on a ruined throne. The people are called
hungry hounds Embossed from their kennels in ST..
Antoine), who press upon her steps and howl for
blood. And so those rustic fools, covering before
her incarnation, cried to their tyrants, Save us
from this Liberty" All, did they know the GEN.
turtles of oppression that produced this sublime
madness called the French Revoution-whose
very name makes the tyrants of the earth tremble
on their thrones-they would have embraced her
and kissed the very blood marks on her brow. Did
they know how the tyrants reveled while the peo-
pie groaned-how homes were made desolate to
glut the appetites of brood Of aristocrats-how
the people were but dogs to be whipped and chain
ed, and starved, that royalty might fourish-how
the men of God, forgetting their calling, became
the whippers-in who kept the pack in order, scourg
ing the people as Christ himself was scourged-
did those rustic congregations know that the world
suffered before the revolution, ireland suffers to-
day, they would hail the coming of Liberty though
she deluged the land in seas of blood.
This blood is terrible thing; but starving men
down systematically, until they have no blood is
according to Providence and the British Constitu-
ton.
Yet Liberty is the same, whether maddened by
her terrible suferings in the French Revolution,
or marching in disciplined determination through
the red years from '7e until her banner was hoist