Note 34 — Chapter VIII

Roche's Life of John Boyle O'Reilly, with introduction by Cardinal Gibbons. Since the publication of this book Cardinal Gibbons has written a letter to the Tablet (Dec. 2, 1899), in which he says: 'I feel it due to myself and the interests of truth to declare that till I read Mr. Lecky's criticism I did not know that Mr. O'Reilly had ever been a Fenian or a British soldier, or that he had tried to seduce other soldiers from their allegiance. In fact, up to this moment, I have never read a line of the biography for which I wrote the introduction.... My only acquaintance with Mr. O'Reilly's history before he came to America was the vague information I had that, for some political offence, the exact nature of which I did not learn, he had been exiled from his native land to a penal colony, from which he afterwards escaped.'

I gladly accept this assurance of Cardinal Gibbons, though I am surprised that he should not have even glanced at the book which he introduced, and that he should have been absolutely ignorant of the most conspicuous event of the life which, from early youth, he held up to unqualified admiration. I regret, too, that he has not taken the opportunity of this letter to reprobate a form of moral perversion which is widely spread among his Irish co-religionists, and which his own words are only too likely to strengthen. It is but a short time since an Irish Nationalist Member of Parliament, being accused of once having served the Queen as a Volunteer, justified himself by saying that he had only worn the coat which was worn by Lord Edward Fitzgerald and Boyle O'Reilly; while another Irish Nationalist Member of Parliament, at a public meeting in Dublin, and amid the cheers of his audience, expressed his hope that in the South African war the Irish soldiers under the British flag would fire on the English instead of on the Boers.