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Updated: May 7, 2025
When the first British statesman of his time, not a Roman Catholic, nor, as the Irish would have said, a Catholic at all, had denounced the upas, or poison, tree of Protestant ascendency, and had cut off its two principal branches, Froude wasted his breath in telling the American Irish, or the American people, that Gladstone did not know what he was talking about.
Thus the generation just before us, our own fathers, uprooted the enormous upas of slavery, "the tree that was literally as old as the race of man," although slavery doubtless had its beginnings in the captives of man's earliest warfare, even as this existing evil thus originated.
It's a strong, irritant poison sap of the upas tree is the base of it producing first an irritation of the skin, then a blister, and, when that broke, communicating the poison directly to the blood every time the skeleton hand touched it. A weak solution at first, so that the decline would be natural, the growth of the malady gradual.
There are a number of Dutch settlers there, because the island was conquered by the Dutch nation, but while war with the natives was going on they suffered terribly from these poisoned arrows; so that the very name of upas caused them to tremble. The word 'upas, in the language of the natives, means poison, and there is in the island a valley called the upas, or poison, valley.
"U, P, A, S. Oh, Ronnie, what do you mean?" He paused, and shading his eyes, looked away over the sunny sea to where the vessels, from the Hook of Holland, come into port. "Just that," he said. "Exactly that. Utterly, preposterously, altogether, selfish. That is the Upas tree." "Oh, Ronnie," she cried, "if you knew " But Ronnie had seen a bowler hat behind the hedge. He called its wearer forward.
She is the stone at the sepulcher of liberty; the upas tree in whose shade the intellect of man has withered; the gorgon beneath whose gaze the human heart has turned to stone. Under her influence even the Protestant mother expects to be in heaven, while her brave boy, who is fighting for the rights of man, shall writhe in hell.
It deliberately ground down and destroyed every spark of intelligence, of liberty, of attempt at progress; it dominated the whole nation like the shadow of the upas tree, manufactured hypocrites, and led to the debasing of a naturally fine people of good instincts to an ignorant and fanatical mob, who, in the name of religion, were entertained with gigantic autos-da-fé, as the Roman populace were with the terrible spectacles of their gladiatorial shows and the immolation of Christian victims in the arena.
The more he brooded over it the more morosely disquieted he became. The thing grew like a upas tree; it spread until it obsessed all his waking hours and invaded even his dreams. Then a time came when he could endure it no more. He faced the necessity of purging his soul of all uncertainty.
He was one of those delightful, irresponsible, erratic persons whose heads thoughts of this kind do not enter, and who are about as deadly to those whose lives are bound up with theirs as a Upas tree. In the memory of his oldest acquaintance, Ruth's father had never done anything but drift amiably through life.
I The Coronation II Love at First Sight III Early Training for an Upright Gentleman IV John Ardworth V The Weavers and the Woof VI The Lawyer and the Body-snatcher VII The Rape of the Mattress VIII Percival visits Lucretia IX The Rose beneath the Upas X The Rattle of the Snake XI Love and Innocence XII Sudden Celebrity and Patient Hope XIII The Loss of the Crossing XIV News from Grabman XV Varieties XVI The Invitation to Laughton XVII The Waking of the Serpent XVIII Retrospect XIX Mr.
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