Peg O My Heart | Page 7

"if more priests did, it's a different
Ireland we'd be livin' in to-day--that we would. The Christian's heaven
seems so far away when he's livin' in hell. Try to make EARTH more
like a heaven and he'll be more apt to listen to stories of the other one.
Tache them to kape their hovels clean and their hearts and lives will
have a betther chance of health. Above all broaden their minds. Give
them education and the Divine tachin' will find a surer restin' place.
Ignorance and dirt fill the hospitals and the asylums, and it is THAT so
many of the priests are fosterin'."
"I'll not listen to another wurrd," cried Father Cahill, turning away.
O'Connell strode in front of him.
"Wait. There's another thing. I've heard more than one priest boast that
there was less sin in the villages of Ireland than in any other country.
And why? What is yer great cure for vice? MARRIAGE--isn't it?"
"What are ye sayin'?"

"I'm sayin' this, Father Cahill. If a boy looks at a girl twice, what do ye
do? Engage them to be married. To you marriage is the safeguard
against sin. And what ARE such marriages? Hunger marryin' thirst!
Poverty united to misery! Men and women ignorant and stunted in
mind and body, bound together by a sacrament, givin' them the right to
bring others, equally distorted, into the wurrld. And when they're born
you baptise them, and you have more souls entered on the great register
for the Holy Church. Bodies livin' in perpetual torment, with a heaven
wavin' at them all through their lives as a reward for their suffering
here. I tell ye ye're wrong! Ye're wrong! Ye're wrong! The misery of
such marriages will reach through all the generations to come. I'd rather
see vice--vice that burns out and leaves scar-white the lives it scorches.
There is more sin in the HEARTS and MINDS of these poor, wretched,
ill-mated people than in the sinks of Europe. There is some hope for the
vicious. Intelligence and common-sense will wean them from it. But
there is no hope for the people whose lives from the cradle to the grave
are drab and empty and sordid and wretched."
As O'Connell uttered this terrible arraignment of the old order of
protecting society by early and indiscriminate marriages, it seemed as if
the mantle of some modern prophet had fallen on him. He had struck at
the real keynote of Ireland's misery to-day. The spirit of oppression
followed them into the privacy of their lives. Even their wives were
chosen for them by their teachers. Small wonder the English
government could enforce brutal and unjust laws when the very
freedom of choosing their mates and of having any voice in the control
of their own homes was denied them.
To Father Cahill such words were blasphemy. He looked at O'Connell
in horror.
"Have ye done?" he asked.
"What else I may have to say will be said on St. Kernan's Hill this
afternoon."
"There will be no meetin' there to-day," cried the priest.

"Come and listen to it," replied the agitator.
"I've forbidden my people to go."
"They'll come if I have to drag them from their homes."
"I've warned the resident-magistrate. The police will be there if ye thry
to hold a meetin'."
"We'll outnumber them ten to one."
"There'll be riotin' and death." "Better to die in a good cause than to
live in a bad one," cried O'Connell. "It's the great dead who lead the
world by their majesty. It's the bad livin' who keep it back by their
infamy."
"Don't do this, Frank O'Connell. I ask you in the name of the Church in
which ye were baptised--by me."
"I'll do it in the name of the suffering people I was born among."
"I command you! Don't do this!"
"I can hear only the voice of my dead father saying: 'Go on!'"
"I entreat you--don't!"
"My father's voice is louder than yours, Father Cahill."
"Have an old man's tears no power to move ye?"
O'Connell looked at the priest. Tears were streaming down his cheeks.
He made no effort to staunch them. O'Connell hesitated, then he said
firmly
"My father wept in the ditch when he was dyin', dying in sight of his
home. Mine was the only hand that wiped away his tears. I can see only
HIS to-day, Father."

"I'll make my last appeal. What good can this meetin' do? Ye say the
people are ignorant and wretched. Why have them batthered and shot
down by the soldiers?"
"It has always been the martyrs who have made a cause. I am willin' to
be one. I'd be a thraitor if I passed my life without lifting my voice and
my hands against my people's oppressors."
"Ye're