Page:A Memorial of John Boyle O'Reilly from the City of Boston.djvu/48

42 It sometimes seemed as if centuries of oppression, generations of protest against tyranny, were concentrated into a single burning paragraph that came from his pen. But then at other times, reading several numbers in succession, looking behind the surface, I could see the truth of what has been said here to-night,—that his influence on the cause of Ireland was, as everywhere else, a reconciling influence,—that he, at least, was conservative among radicals, and that the excesses and extremes that have occurred, and that we all deplore, would have been greater than they were, but for the influence of that well-considered and reasonable pen.

I am not one of those who can criticise a man who was so good an American for being not merely incidentally and occasionally, but steadily and underneath it all, an Irishman also.

I never have been among those who believed it to be the duty of an Irishman, as soon as he set foot on this soil and looted around for his naturalization papers, to forget the wrongs and sorrows he had left behind him.

I cannot complain of Boyle O'Reilly, that through life in his spirit he kept the green flag waving beside the Stars and Stripes, any more than I can forget the recorded joy of McClellan in the terrible battles of the Peninsula, when he saw the green flags borne by each regiment in Meagher's