< Page:Life of John Boyle O'Reilly.djvu
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.

HIS LIFE, POEMS AND SPEECHES.

341

reward or recompense, except that which the consciousness of having given away time, health, and even life, brings with it,—would undertake the task. If there are any such men in America," said the Cardinal, "I will be glad to hear from them, and particularly glad to enroll the emancipated blacks in my little army."

"There!" exclaimed O'Reilly, "that is the work I would like to do." But for the hostages to fortune, I think he would have volunteered to raise the little army on the spot.

He had great faith in the possibilities of the Southern negro. When the news of the butchery of eight black men at Barnwell, S. C, was received, following three or four other similar ghastly stories, he wrote:

The black race in the South must face the inevitable, soon or late, and the inevitable is—depend yourself. If they shrink from this, they will be trampled on with yearly increasing cruelty until they have sunk back from the great height of American freedom to which the war-wave carried them. And in the end, even submission will not save them. On this continent there is going to be no more slavery. That is settled forever. Not even voluntary slavery will be tolerated. Therefore, unless the Southern blacks learn to defend their homes, women, and lives, by law first and by manly force in extremity, they will be exterminated like the Tasmanian and Australian blacks. No other race has ever obtained fair play from the Anglo-Saxon without fighting for it, or being ready to fight. The Southern blacks should make no mistake about the issue of the struggle they are in. They are fighting for the existence of their race; and they cannot fight the Anglo-Saxon by lying down under his feet.

For such remarks as the above he was accused of inciting the negroes by incendiary language, one Catholic paper, telling him, "It is neither Catholic nor American to rouse the negroes of the South to open and futile rebellion." He replied:

True, and the Pilot has not done so. We have appealed only to the great Catholic and American principle of resisting wrong and outrage, of protecting life and home and the honor of families by all lawful means, even the extremest, when nothing else remains to be tried. We shall preach this always, for black and white, North and South, please God.
This article is issued from Wikisource. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.