Ireland's Moderation, Chapters I-XII [pp. 94-103]

100 IRELAND'S MoDERA 710K [April,
sentiment of shame in the heart of an American non-Catholic,
and that does not arouse a spirit of resentment in the heart of
the patriotic Irish Catholic.
Their noblest and most cherished religious monuments were
not only defaced by English troops and confiscated by the
English government, but they are still kept in ruins even where
the people desire to restore them, and they are entrusted to
boards from which Catholics are practically excluded, and exhibited by igporant Protestant guides who have no sympathy
with their ancient memories. Every guide I met near these
ruins was a Protestant, ignorant and bigoted, whose religion
consisted in hating the pope and whose patriotism consisted in
hating the Celt. Ihe majestic ruins of the Rock of Cashe], for
example, are shown by a babbling Orangeman, who is generally
drunk. The tomb of the last Irish Christian king at Cong is
owned by a rich Protestant brewer, whose wealth was w9n by
debasing three generations of the Irish race, and every representative of whose family has been noted as an enemy of every
national movement, from the earliest days of O'Connell to the
latest days of Parnell. I visited the church at Drogheda, built,
as the guide told me (with a base exultation), on the site of the
Catholic church in which Cromwell slowly burned to death the
helpless worshippers, and whose troopers, as he wrote to Parliament, "knocked on the head" the unarmed friars who sought to
escape the flames. I supposed it to be a Catholic church until I
entered it and saw that it was a Protestant church. Everything
I had read of the terrors of the siege of Drogheda at once
rushed into my mind. I heard the shrieks, I saw the writhing
forms of the victims, and I rushed in horror from the building.
The guide thought that I was sick. He could not understand
my feelings of indignation and amazement. He saw nothing out
of place in worshipping God in that place. "Sure, it was a decent church!" He was only puzzled how a Protestant could
feel as he saw that I felt about it.
VIII.
Now, altogether apart from any question of the validity of
ancient titles; admitting, to avoid vain arguments, that a conqueror has the right as well as the power to confiscate church
property-what an American sees in the policy of England with
respect to these Irish ruins and other ecclesiastical and ancient
national edifices, judging it from a strictly secular and political