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Updated: September 19, 2025
They simply formed a huge secret society on the model of the "Molly Maguires" or "Moonlighters," whose special function was to intimidate, flog, mutilate, or murder political opponents in the night time. This society was called the "Ku-Klux Klan." Let me give some account of its operation, and I shall make it as brief as possible.
They were the "Special Constables" of the Molly Maguires recruited for the first time by an Irish organisation to kill the right of free speech for which Irishmen had been contending with their lives through the generations. It would be quite a comedy of Irish topsy-turvydom were it not, in fact, such a disastrous tragedy.
But Art, alas! in spite of all his dignity of old blood, and his rodomontade about the Fermanagh Maguires, was utterly deficient in that decent pride which makes a man respect himself, and prevents him from committing a mean action.
Ay," he proceeded, with a hideous laugh "ha, ha, ha! I'm a fine fellow amn't I? There she lies now, and yet she was wanst Margaret Murray! my own Margaret that left them all for myself; but sure if she did, wasn't I one of the great Maguires of Fermanagh? Get up, Margaret; here, I'll help you up, if the divil was in you!" He raised her as he spoke, and perceived that consciousness was returning.
"You afeard of any one," exclaimed Tom Whiskey; "one o' the ould Maguires afeard! ha, ha, ha! that 'ud be good!" Art, when the tumblers came in, drank off first one, which he had no sooner emptied, than he shivered into pieces against the grate; he then emptied the other, which shared the same fate. "Now," said he to Barney, "bring me a third one; I'll let yez see what a Maguire is."
Above were sculptured rows of lowering, ape-like faces from Nast's and Keppler's cartoons, and out of these sprang into the vague upper gloom on the one side, lamp-posts from which negroes hung by the neck, and on the other gibbets for dynamiters and Molly Maguires, and between the two glowed a spectral picture of some black-robed tonsured men, with leering satanic masks, making a bonfire of the Bible in the public schools.
Such a workman plies his handiwork at his own house, teaching his sons the secrets of his trade. He is the necessary coadjutor of the machine-owner, and has no need to resort to the brutal methods of Molly Maguires and trades-unions to get a fair reward for his labor. Let demagogues rant about our danger from competition with the pauper labor of Europe!
Come, Frank, here's the ould blood of Ireland the Maguires of Fermanagh! And now, Frank, I tell you, it would more become you to drink that toast, than to be sittin' there like an oracle, as you are; for upon my sowl, you're nearly as bad. But, Frank." "Well, Art." "Isn't little Toal Finnigan a civil little fellow that is is if he was well made.
I'm Art Maguire; one of the great Maguires of Fermanagh! Think of the blood of the Maguires, and stand a glass. Barney Scaddhan won't trust me now; although many a pound and penny of good money I left him." "Ay," the person accosted would reply, "an' so sign's on you; you would be a different man to-day, had you visited Barney Scaddhan's seldomer, or kept out of it altogether."
The Desmonds and Kildares, in the south, the O'Donnells, Maguires, and others, in the north, soon showed themselves animated by a new spirit of ardent Catholicism; created, in fact, a new nation, quite apart from, or rather embracing, clanship, well-nigh destroyed the English power, kept Elizabeth, during the whole of her reign, in constant agitation and fear, and would have succeeded in recovering their independence, and securing freedom of worship, had not their good-nature been imposed upon by the hypocrisy and faithlessness of the Stuarts, to whom they always looked for freedom in the practice of their religion, without ever obtaining it.
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