broad-arrowed

Updated: May 4, 2025

Go back in memory to the day, when with cropped hair with the broad-arrowed coat, the yellow stockings this man dragged wearily the wheelbarrow in the grim silences under the sinister skies of Dartmoor, with warders to taunt, or insult, or browbeat the Irish felon-patriot with the very dregs and scum of our lowest social depths for companions and colleagues and then think of this same man standing up before the supreme and august assembly where the might, sovereignty, power, and omnipotence of this world-wide empire are centred, and holding it for more than an hour and a half under a spell of rapt attention that almost suggested the high-strung devotion of a religious service in place of a raging political controversy think of this contrast, and then bless the day and the policy that have made possible such a transformation.

T. P. O'Conner - Sketches in the House (1893)