Liverpool
had receded into a long, low line of twinkling lamps. My thoughts went
through the mist to the land of my own people now passing through the
throes of a great change.
Erin, beloved and beautiful, once more
The time of parting comes to thee and me;
The sad delight of pilgrimage is o'er,
And voices call to me across the sea.
In Canada the magic summer shines,
A purple haze upon the mountain broods,
The soft warm breeze is whispering through the pines.
And leaping waters thunder through the woods.
September radiance tints the forest grand,
The maples are aflame upon the hills;
From bursting barns plenty smiles o'er the land,
Where the tall farmer owns the soil he tills.
Erin, thy robe of green is dewed with tears,
Fields outrage-stained, thy west wind thick with sighs,
Thou that hast walked with woe down through the years,
Weighted with all the wrongs of centuries.
Erin, beloved with love akin to pain,
Through woe and outrage, turbulence and strife,
Thou shalt arise and enter once again
Into a higher, freer, glorious life.
A LAST WORD - THE CAUSE OF IRELAND'S TROUBLES.
Because I have had the privilege of being Irish correspondent for the
Montreal _Witness_ for a time, I think it right to explain to you
the change which travelling through my native country has produced in my
sentiments and the convictions forced upon me.
Brought up in the North of Ireland in a purely Hiberno-Scotch
neighborhood, I drank in with my native air all the ideas which reign in
that part of Ireland. The people with whom I came in contact were
Conservatives of the strongest type; from my youth up, therefore, I had
the cause of Ireland's poverty and misery as an article of belief. I
never dreamed that the tenure of land had anything to do with it.
Landlords were lords and leaders, benefactors and protectors to their
tenants in my imagination.
I changed my opinion while in Ireland, and now I believe that the land
tenure is the main cause of Ireland's miseries.
English history is pretty much a history of struggles against monopolies
of one kind and another. There is no monopoly, it seems to me, which
bears such evil fruit as the monopoly of all the land of a country in
the hands of a few. It is bad for the country, bad for the people, and
bad for the landlords, whether the monopolists are honorable companies,
a landed aristocracy, or an ecclesiastical corporation. God's-law, which
is the law of our faith, shows plainly how the Great Lawgiver regards
the monopoly of land by the care which He took to have a direct interest
in the land of Canaan by personal inheritance for every Jew.
