rt in an
intrepid breast; tell me, for you must needs remember, on that day
when the destinies of mankind were trembling in the balance, while
death fell in showers upon them, when the artillery of France,
levelled with a precision of the most deadly science, played upon
them, when her legions, incited by the voice and inspired by the
example of their mighty leader, rushed again and again to the
onset--tell me if for one instant, when to hesitate for one
instant was to be lost, the 'aliens' blenched!

"And when at length the moment for the last and decisive movement
had arrived, and the valour which had so long been wisely cheeked
was at length let loose, tell me if Ireland with less heroic
valour than the natives of your own glorious isle, precipitated
herself upon the foe?

"The blood of England, of Scotland, and of Ireland, flowed in the
same stream, on the same field. When the still morning dawned,
their dead lay cold and stark together; in the same deep earth
their bodies were deposited; the green corn of spring is now
breaking from their commingled dust; the dew falls from Heaven
upon their union in the grave.

"Partners in every peril--in the glory shall we not be permitted
to participate, and shall we be told as a requital that we are
aliens, and estranged from the noble country for whose salvation
our life-blood was poured out?"

A hundred years of strife, misunderstanding, anger, estrangement,
outrages, bloodshed, and murder separate us from this appealing cry
wrung from the beating heart of this inspired Irishman. Is the great
tragedy of England and Ireland that has sullied their annals for seven
hundred years never to be brought to an end? Is there never to be for
us a Lethe through which we may pass to the farther shore of
forgetfulness and forgiveness of the past and reconciliation in the
future?

That you may live to see it, Antony, is my hope and prayer.

Your loving old
G.P.

23

MY DEAR ANTONY,

I gave you in a former letter Burke's famous passage on the fate of
Marie Antoinette--in some ways the most splendid of his
utterances,--and I now am going to quote to you a very great passage
from Thomas Carlyle on the same tragic subject.

Courageous was it of Carlyle, who must certainly have been familiar
with Burke's noble ejaculation, to challenge it with emulation; but in the
result we must ad