Physicians From Ireland

"The very oppressions which the Irish suffer at home, teach them to prize the freedom of America more ardently than is always done by her native sons, who have the exalted privilege of knowing nothing of despotism, but what they learn from the description of other nation."

"When Erin first rose from the dark-swelling flood, God blessed the green island, he saw it was good. The Emerald of Europe, it sparkled and shone In the ring of this world, the most precious stone."

"Pure, just, benign; thus filial love would trace The virtues hallowing this narrow space; The Emerald Isle may grant a wider claim, And link the Patriot with his country's name."

"Hapless nation, hapless land, Heap of uncementing sand! Crumbled by a foreign weight, Or by worse, domestic hate!"

"Men of Erin! awake, and make haste to be blest! Rise! arch of the ocean, and queen of the West!"

"Arm of Erin, prove strong, but be gentle as brave, And, uplifted to strike, still be ready to save; Nor one feeling of vengeance presume to defile The cause or the men of the Emerald Isle."

"I make not my division of the hours By dials, clocks, or waking birds’ acclaim, Nor measure seasons by the reigning flowers, The spring’s green glories, or the autumn’s flame. To me thy absence winter is, and night, Thy presence spring, and the meridian day. From thee I draw my darkness and my light, Now swart eclipse, now more than heavenly ray. Thy coming warmeth all my soul like fire, And through my heartstrings melodies do run, As poets fabled the Memnonian lyre Hymned acclamation to the rising sun. My heart hums music in thy influence set: So winds put harps Aeolian on the fret."

"The rude rebuffs of bay-besieging winds But make the anchored ships towards them turn, So thy unkindness unto me but finds My love tow’rds thee with keener ardour burn; As myrrh incised bleeds odoriferous gum, I am become a poet through my wrong, For through the sad-mouthed heart-wounds in me come These earthly echoes of celestial song. My thoughts as birds make flutter in my heart, Poor muffled choristers! whose sad refrain Gives sorrow sleep, and bids that woe depart Whose heavy burden weighs upon my strain. Imprisoned larks pipe sweeter than when free, And I, enslaved, have learnt to sing for thee."

"Thy throne is ringed by amorous cavaliers, And all the air is heavy with the sound Of tiptoe compliment, whilst anxious fears Strike dumb the lesser satellites around. One clasps thy hand, another squires thy chair, Some bask in light shed from the eyes of thee, Some taste the perfume shaken from thy hair, Some watch afar their worshipped deity. All have their orbits, and due distance keep, As round the sun concentric planets move; Smiles light yon lord, whilst I, at distance, weep In the sad twilight of uncertain love. ’Thwart thee, my sun, how many a mincer slips, Whose constant transits make for me eclipse."

"Know that the age of Pyrrha is long passed, And though thy form is eternized in stone, The sculptor’s doings cannot Time outlast, Nor Beauty live save but in blood and bone; Though new Pygmalions should again arise Idolatrous of images like thee, Time the iconoclast e’en stone destroys, As steadfast rocks are splintered by the sea. Thou shouldst indeed a hamadryad be, Inhabiting some knotted oak alone, And so revive the worship of the Tree Which, by succession, outlives barren stone. Though thus transformed still worshippers would woo, As Daphne-laurels poets yet pursue."

"Why dost thou like a Roman vestal make The whole long year unmarriageable May, And, like the phoenix, no companion take To share the wasteful burthen of decay? See this rich climate, where the airs that blow Are heavenly suspirings, and the skies Steep day from head to heel in summer glow, And moons make mellow mornings as they rise; As brides white-veiled that come to marry earth, Now each mist-morning sweet July attires, Now moon-night mists are not of earthly birth, But silver smoke blown down from heavenly fires. Skies kiss the earth, clouds join the land and sea, All Nature marries, only thou art free."

"O what an eve was that which ushered in The night that crowned the wish I cherished long! Heaven’s curtains oped to see the night begin, And infant winds broke lightly into song; Methought the hours in softly-swelling sound Wailed funeral dirges for the dying light; I seemed to stand upon a neutral ground Between the confines of the day and night; For o’er the east Night stretched her sable rod, And ranked her stars in glittering array, While, in the west, the golden twilight trod With [burning] crimsons on the verge of day. Bright bars of cloud formed in the glowing even A Jacob-ladder joining earth and heaven."

"O sweet Queen-city of the golden South, Piercing the evening with thy starlit spires, Thou wert a witness when I kissed the mouth Of her whose eyes outblazed the skiey fires. I saw the parallels of thy long streets With lamps like angels shining all a-row, While overhead the empyrean seats Of gods were steeped in paradisic glow. The Pleiades with rarer fires were tipt, Hesper sat throned upon his jewelled chair, The belted giant’s triple stars were dipt In all the splendour of Olympian air. On high to bless, the Southern Cross did shine, Like that which blazed o’er conquering Constantine."

"In these times of ours, when all classes in society, from the Bowery Socialists to the highest professors of science, seem to vie with one another in demanding State interference, State protection, and State regulation, when the ideal State to the workingman is that proposed by the authoritarian Marx, or the scarcely less authoritarian George, and the ideal State to the scientist is the Germany of today, where the scientists are under the government’s special protection, it would seem idle to hope that the voices of those who prize liberty above an things, who would fain call attention to the false direction in which it is desired to make the world move, should be other than “voices crying in the wilderness.” But, nevertheless, it is not by accident that we who hold the ideas that what is necessary to progress is not the increase, but the decrease, of governmental interference have come to be possessed of these ideas. We, too, are “heirs of all the ages,” and it is our duty to that society of which we form a part to give our reasons for the “faith that is in us.”"

"We still have no evidence on record to prove that great men are endowed with more than the ordinary share of common sense, which is so necessary in conducting the ordinary affairs of life. Indeed, if the gossip of history is to be in any way trusted, great men have usually obtained less than the ordinary share of this commodity. Frederick the Great is reported to have said that, if he wished to ruin one of his provinces, he would hand its government over to the philosophers. Is it into the hands of a Bacon, who had no more sense than to expose himself (for the sake of a little experiment which could have been made just as well without the exposure), a Newton who ordered the grate to be removed when the fire became too hot for him, a Clifford, who worked himself to death, that the direction of the affairs of a people is to be given, with the assurance that they will be carried on better than now?"

"It is our duty to truth to cultivate the spirit which questions all things"

"Do you think that a country, one of whose most distinguished professors, Virchow, is afraid of giving voice to the doctrine of evolution, because he sees that it inevitably leads to Socialism (and Socialism the government has decided is wrong, and must be crushed out), is in the way of long maintaining its supremacy as a scientific light, when the question which its scientific men are called upon to decide is not what is true, but what the government will allow to be said?"

"As Leslie Stephen has demonstrated, to suppress one truth is to suppress all truth, for truth is a coherent whole."

"Responsibility is the parent of morality"

"It is always important that the position of devil’s advocate should be well filled."

"Will advance by having no opinion protected from discussion and agitation, by having the greatest possible freedom of thought, of speech, and of the press."

"Dr. Gertrude Kelly, a surgeon of great skill and a supporter of the Irish Republic."

"In basing their demands on a claim of justice-women are human beings; therefore they ought to possess all the rights and privileges of human beings-the anarchist-feminists refused to make any extravagant claims for social and political benefits that would flow from equality. But they thereby lost an opportunity to appeal to men on the grounds most likely to gain their attention, those of self-interest. The early feminists had faced the same problem and their arguments also had failed to win masculine support. As a result, the suffragists at the end of the century often felt it necessary to exploit their womanhood in an attempt to render feminism more palatable to men. Such tactics were unacceptable to the anarchist-feminists, but a few of them did try to persuade their male comrades that women's equality was essential to a radical platform. Gertrude B. Kelly, for example, argued that a successful revolution would depend on a commitment to feminism, contending that unless radical men began to take steps to end the oppression of women, their attempts to remake the world would end in failure. She agreed with her male comrades who said that there was "properly speaking no woman question as apart from the question of human right and human liberty." But men often used such statements to try to persuade women to mute their demands for sexual equality until after the liberation of the "people" had been accomplished, implying that while the concerns of male revolutionaries were by their very nature universal, those of women were at best parochial. Kelly, on the other hand, insisted that without sexual equality no liberation could take place. Men hurt themselves as well as women by their refusal to recognize this: "No wrong can be done to any class in society without part at least of the evil reverting to the wrong-doers."...Gertrude Kelly's earnest attempt to enlist male support through appeals to self-interest was unusual. The anarchist-feminists recognized for the most part that women must seek their own emancipation. They placed (accurately as it turned out) little faith in the enlightenment of radical men. The significance of their approach may be seen most clearly by an examination of the anarchist-feminists proposals for the reorganization of society based on the premise of economic and psychological independence from men."

"Anarchist-feminists found it difficult to persuade their male corevolutionaries to take the Woman Question seriously...Gertrude Kelly berated them because she believed that by ignoring the demands of women radical men were actually retarding the revolution"

"The enthusiasms of the social feminists for example temperance, protective legislation for women and children workers, and social purity usually drew a negative response from the anarchist-feminists, both communists and Individualists. Although like the more conventional feminists they abhorred prostitution, anarchists believed it to be a predictable result of both capitalism and societal repression of sexuality that could only be removed by the overthrow of both. The Individualist Gertrude Kelly argued in 1885 that social purity advocates possessed the evidence to show "that destitution is the chief cause of prostitution" but that they refused to follow the logic of their findings. "When we come to examine the remedies proposed, we find not a word on the subject of... making their wages equal to those of a man for the same work.""

"Voltairine de Cleyre possessed one of the best minds among the American anarchists, and her essays, particularly in the early twentieth century, were sophisticated and subtle. On the other hand, the other anarchist-feminists who attempted to explain anarchist ideas tended to approach every problem as a separate issue without reconciling, or in some cases even noticing, disharmonies and contradictions. They espoused feminism and the standard anarchist remedies for social ills without troubling to look for connections. It almost seems as if they deliberately avoided those questions that would force them to confront anarchist ideology as a whole. Gertrude B. Kelly, for example, concentrated on questions of finance when she was not writing about women. She was enthusiastic about the innovation of checking accounts, which she viewed as the harbinger of the Mutual Bank, an institution that, for Individualists, was at the heart of anarchist economics. Yet she not only found it unnecessary to explain the effect of new bank practices on the overall power structure, but she also failed to connect monetary issues with questions about the redistribution of wealth or the economic role of women.'..Where Gertrude B. Kelly had confined herself to specific details of anarchist thought without attempting an inclusive analysis, Florence Finch Kelly offered sweeping generalities without touching on their application."