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Undeniably the hungry, cruel gods are degenerate from the Australian Father in Heaven, who receives no sacrifice but that of men's lusts and selfishness; who desires obedience, not the fat of kangaroos; who needs nothing of ours; is unfed and unbribed.
Shoulder to shoulder gathered around him the patriot spirits of his nation, men unbribed by the golden spoils of governmental patronage Shiel with his ardent eloquence, O'Dwyer and Walsh, and Grattan and O'Connor, and Steel, the Protestant agitator, wearing around him the emblem of national reconciliation, of the reunion of Catholic and Protestant, the sash of blended orange and green, soiled and defaced by his patriotic errands, stained with the smoke of cabins, and the night rains and rust of weapons, and the mountain mist, and the droppings of the wild woods of Clare.
To her it was the centenary of the great betrayal to which, as a distinguished writer has said, the whole of her unbribed intellect was opposed, and which formed the climax to a century of suffering. The ancients who held that when ill-fortune befell their country the gods must be asleep would have said so, I have no doubt, of Ireland at the end of the eighteenth century.
For if politics is merely a guerilla war between the bribed and the unbribed, then statecraft is not a human service but a moral testing ground. It is a public amusement, a melodrama of real life, in which a few conspicuous characters are tried, and it resembles nothing so much as schoolboy hazing which we are told exists for the high purpose of detecting a "yellow streak."
When his family, and even his wife, reasoned with him, knowing that to enter Parliament had long been his thought, nay, his desire, and perhaps herself taking a natural pride in the idea of seeing M.P. M.P. of a new and unbribed House of Commons after his well-beloved name; to us and to her he gave no clearer motive for his refusal than to the electors of Norton Bury.
Shoulder to shoulder gathered around him the patriot spirits of his nation, men unbribed by the golden spoils of governmental patronage Shiel with his ardent eloquence, O'Dwyer and Walsh, and Grattan and O'Connor, and Steel, the Protestant agitator, wearing around him the emblem of national reconciliation, of the reunion of Catholic and Protestant, the sash of blended orange and green, soiled and defaced by his patriotic errands, stained with the smoke of cabins, and the night rains and rust of weapons, and the mountain mist, and the droppings of the wild woods of Clare.
Such works have their purpose, and Froude's is an unusually eloquent specimen of its class; but they are not history, any more than the speech of Lord Clare on the Union, or the Diary of Wolfe Tone. Froude does not explain, nor seem to understand, what the supporters of the Irish Legislature meant. Speaker Foster said that the whole unbribed intellect of Ireland was against the Union.
"There is no more mercy in them," said another of the banditti, "than in an unbribed sheriffs officer." "It is, however, as I say," said Gurth. "Strike a light instantly," said the Captain; "I will examine this said purse; and if it be as this fellow says, the Jew's bounty is little less miraculous than the stream which relieved his fathers in the wilderness."
There are those of us who jubilantly burst into poetry, singing: "Here shall the press the people's rights maintain, Unawed by influence and unbribed by gain." On the other hand there are some of us quite ready to corroborate from our own experience the confessions of one New York journalist who wrote: There is no such thing in America as an independent press.
The universal conscience, unbribed, unstifled as on the fateful day in Eden conscience, the only thing in man left standing erect when all else fell still cries out, "YOU OUGHT!" still rebels at evil, still compels the human heart to cry for rules of right and wrong, and still urges man to the one, and withholds him from the other.
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