The gangs all over the farm formed into little squads and marched towards the prison … the warders drawing after them the light iron bridges of the canals which were locked on one side every night. By this means The Farm, which was intercepted by a score of the wide and deep trenches, was impassable; and as it hemmed in one side of the hill on which the prison stood, with a guard tower on either end, it was a greater safeguard even than the walls of the prison.
When In Bohemia was published in the fall of 1886, he was criticised as earlier for defects of grace and finish. Bohemia was cast as an ideal republic: ‘I’d rather fail in Bohemia than win in another land …’
Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote generously that he had ‘recognised a genuine fire of inspiration in your verse … if they have faults which have escaped my too hasty reading, that is a small matter when a poem has life in it.’ But if O’Reilly strove to be Whitman, his tragedy probably was that he strove also to be Whittier or Longfellow. After his house at Hull was damaged by an Atlantic storm in November 1888, he turned the tempest to good account in a narrative poem about heroic fishermen going out to rescue the passengers of three vessels which had foundered off the coast.
It was in that insomniac decade that he further established himself as a major American occasional poet. In 1882, at the reunion of the Grand Army of the Potomac in Detroit, he read a poem of which Grant said, ‘That is the grandest poem I have ever heard.’ John Greenleaf Whittier and Oliver Wendell Holmes had also written letters of appreciation.
It reads nicely enough now:
Here towns unguarded lie, for here alone
Nor caste, nor kin, nor privilege is known.
For home our farmer plows, our miner delves,
A land of toilers, toiling for themselves;
A land of cities, which no fortress shields,
Whose open streets reach out to fertile fields …
He praised the Union for abstaining from punishing the South.
No brutal show abased thine honoured State:
Grant turned from Richmond at the very gate!
Similarly, when Wendell Phillips, his Bostonian prophet, died in a cold November in 1885, O’Reilly—stricken and orphaned—stayed up late in the Pilot office writing the official verse obituary.
For his life was a ceaseless protest, and his voice was a prophet’s cry
To be true to the Truth and faithful, though the worlds were arrayed for the Lie.
Meanwhile, O’Reilly published some early verse of that very different poet, Oscar Wilde, who wrote to him, ‘I esteem it a great honour that the first American paper I appeared in should be your admirable Pilot.’ P. W. Rolleston, Douglas Hyde, founder of the Gaelic League, Lady Wilde, alias Speranza, Catherine Tynan and William Butler Yeats were contributors to the Pilot and were published by its esteemed editor.
The grail of Home Rule was by the early 1880s so beloved by the Irish diaspora that from Nevada to Western Australia mines were named to honour the idea, and a discharged political felon of an earlier generation than O’Reilly’s was about to make a massive sacrifice for it.
No one seemed safer from fatal Irish enthusiasms than the former Young Irelander Kevin Izod O’Doherty of Brisbane, an admired, handsome paterfamilias and accomplished colonial surgeon, twelve or thirteen thousand miles removed from the seat of Home Rule agitation. O’Doherty’s zeal seemed up to this point to have been emphatically Australian in scope. Returning to the Queensland Parliament in 1877 as a legislative councillor, a member of the state upper house, O’Doherty was able to push through this conservative forum a bill to give the Central Board of Health authority over quarantine, vaccination, drainage, sanitation and food purity. It is hard to imagine anyone opposing such reforms, but Queensland would always be an anarchically individualist state, and many of his fellow councillors opposed the measures as intrusive. These battles of his early fifties in the state legislature were fought without the comfort of his spouse, Eva. She was proudly conveying their two oldest sons, William and Edward, across the world; William, the eldest, was to study dentistry in Philadelphia, and Edward to study medicine at the Royal College of Surgeons, Dublin. The San Francisco Monitor announced the arrival of ‘Eva of the Nation,’ and her sons looked at her with amazed delight to find their 47-year-old mother so famous so far from Brisbane! She was able to place a manuscript of her poems with a San Francisco company. The proofs of the book were ready when she returned via San Francisco to take ship for Queensland later that year, and the verses were dedicated to ‘The Felons John Mitchel and John Martin,’ the former of whom was closer to her in politics than was her pragmatic husband. Most of the poems were of Irish revolution, but one was a climatically enthusiastic but socially cool verse named Queensland.
But ah! Upon the bright expanse,
The glory of a clime Elysian,
’Tis but a cold and soulless glance
That meets the gazer’s vision.
Despite Eva’s ambiguity, O’Doherty now seemed entrenched for life. A premier of Queensland, Arthur Macallister, consulted O’Doherty over epileptic convulsions which he suffered. O’Doherty had also been asked to produce a special report on the Peel Island Quarantine Station, where conditions were said to be primitive. The newly arriving governor of Queensland, Sir Arthur Kennedy, was himself quarantined at Dr O’Doherty’s word aboard the smallpox-stricken steamer Brisbane. O’Doherty exempted His Excellency’s daughter and her companion from compulsory chest inspections, inspecting their hands and wrists instead.
But half the landscape of Saint Kevin’s mind was still Irish. When the news of the 1879 famine in Ireland reached Queensland, O’Doherty, with John Flood, the pardoned Fenian who had settled on the gold-fields of Gympie, north of Brisbane, convened a meeting. They were hugely successful, for contribution to famine relief was not seen as political. A relief fund of £12,000 was raised, more per capita—said the Brisbane Courier—than other Australian states.
Yet the Courier ran frequent, bitter attacks on Parnell and Home Rule. O’Doherty was chairman of the Irish Land League in Brisbane, to the disapproval of the Brisbane Courier, who reminded him that if Parnell and his followers ‘need sympathy at present, then sympathy is given to shooting landlords and bailiffs, maiming cattle, burning hayricks, poisoning coverts and establishing both in town and country the worst despotism on earth—the despotism of the mob.’ When the Redmond brothers, John and William, principal lieutenants of Parnell, visited Queensland in 1883, O’Doherty innocently took them to the camp of the Queensland Volunteer Forces, which raised eyes in the officers’ mess. The Redmonds suggested an Irish national convention in Melbourne, and O’Doherty attended, even though the Brisbane Courier repudiated it as ‘a disloyal assemblage aimed against our Queen and country.’
By now the O’Doherty family had much at stake. They lived in a splendid villa named ‘Frascati,’ after the area of Blackrock, Dublin, where Kevin’s mother had lived. The lower floor of Frascati supplied Kevin and Edward with consulting rooms, and a third room was used by William for his dental practice. In 1885, O’Doherty thought himself so well established at Frascati that he decided to travel to Ireland to see the elections to be held later that year. He had been in Australia a quarter of a century, and believed himself safe from disapproval. His son Edward would run the medical practice.
At a meeting O’Doherty had with Parnell in London, the proposition of a safe Irish seat was discussed. Prodded by Michael Davitt, the Dublin corporation gave O’Doherty the freedom of the City of Dublin, and honoured him at a banquet attended by Parnell. The Brisbane Courier mocked him accordingly: ‘Doctor O’Doherty is presently “starring it” in the Emerald Isle, or the Isle of the Saints or the “most distressful country” as it is variously known … all things considered, he is reaping not unpleasant remarks for the little indiscretions of his hot youth.’ And at the Land League Convention in Dublin on 8 October he was selected as the election candidate for North Meath. Not being required to campaign, bei
ng sure of election on his name alone, he made as brief a visit as he could back to Australia, as surgeon aboard the Duke of Westminster. On arrival in Australia he heard that on the new form of household electoral right in use for the first time, he had been elected to the House of Commons.
Though he was guest of honour at various functions in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne over the summer of 1885–6, they were largely Irish, proHome Rule dinners. The Brisbane banquet, attended by 300 worthies, was boycotted—to use that word which had now spread throughout the empire—by the mass of Queensland parliamentarians. There had been recent dynamitings, financed by the Skirmishing Fund and carried out by the Chicago Triangle, at the London Metropolitan Railway station near Tottenham Court Road, the Tower of London and the Houses of Parliament. All of these had been victimless, but they outraged colonial opinion. O’Doherty had to tell a public meeting that ‘he had an interview with Mr Parnell shortly after arriving in Dublin, and he could assure his hearers that there was no feeling stronger in Mr Parnell’s mind than his horror of dynamite and outrages of every kind.’
O’Doherty returned to England by steamer and was presented to the Speaker of the House of Commons in the spring of 1886. The Irish were a bloc of eighty-six members in the House, and held the balance of power which had returned Gladstone and caused him to promise Home Rule. A Home Rule bill was being drafted when O’Doherty took his seat, and in his first speech at its second reading, O’Doherty told the House, ‘I have an exceptional claim to speak in this debate from the fact that I have travelled all the way from the other end of the world—from the colony of Queensland … The whole of the Australian colonies received this benefit of Home Rule in its fullest extent … In no single case of these six colonies has there been the slightest difficulty.’ Two factions of the Liberals voted against the bill, and the cause was lost in a crucial late night vote on 8 June 1886, 343 votes to 311. This defeat saw Gladstone lose office. There would in the end be three Home Rule bills, including the one for which O’Doherty had sacrificed so much. The second, in 1893, would also be defeated and the third, in 1912, would go down before the combined vote of Conservatives and Ulster Loyalists—all with dire results not fully resolved to this day.
O’Doherty declined to stand in the ensuing election, citing, ‘only imperative private reasons.’ According to a Queensland journalist, O’Doherty was secretly repelled by Parnell’s cold character and said so to a number of his best Brisbane friends. ‘He was cold, autocratic, intolerant, and without a scrap of human sentiment.’ But whatever he thought of Parnell, O’Doherty had financial difficulties as well. His medical practice had suffered—to what extent due to his absence, and to what extent colonial primness—is hard to say. He had trouble with the mortgage on Frascati. His daughter Gertrude would later say, and Eva would tell a correspondent, that ‘it was for financial reasons, not from any other cause, that he was obliged to resign and return to Australia.’ The relentless criticism of the Courier and the Brisbane Telegraph had eroded the value of his practice. Edward had lost patients for the same reason. O’Doherty went for a time to Sydney to work as a member of the honorary staff at St Vincent’s Hospital. Here he was feted by the Irish community, who began collecting money in appreciation of his services to Ireland and in tacit acknowledgement of his present troubles.
In 1887, still a Brisbane pariah, he was appointed Government Medical Officer at a place called Croydon in North Queensland where gold had been discovered. It was no post for an eminent surgeon, and he did not choose to take Eva, since Croydon lay in equatorial country, beyond the Tropic of Capricorn, and in dry, scrubby terrain inland from the Gulf of Carpenteria. It was a sad posting for a man approaching his sixty-fourth birthday, but he hoped—as he had in the 1850s when he and Pat Smyth had gone to the Victorian gold-field—that one spare-time bonanza would fix everything. He was on a gold-field where death from haphazard sanitation, mine disasters and lung disease was so high that by 1889 the life insurance companies refused to issue policies there. The miners were hardy and were loath to call for medical attention until their children were already failing, or their wives already perishing of milk fever or other complications of childbirth. One man accused him of having been drunk while attending a patient, and although there was no evidence of the fact, it could not be remarkable that a man of such qualifications on a remote gold-field would have soothed himself with liquor.
Returned to Brisbane and Eva none the wealthier in 1889, he had to sell Frascati, and his sons found consulting rooms elsewhere. Dr Edward O’Doherty was forced to declare bankruptcy as a world recession deepened and the O’Dohertys remained under a loyalist cloud. Saint Kevin was reduced to advertising medical advice at 5 shillings a consultation, and medicine and consultation at 7 shillings and 6 pence. It was harrowing for brave Eva to see her husband reduced to such medical dodges. But the government of Queensland itself came to his aid in the end by giving him three part-time jobs—secretaryship of the Board of Health, superintendency of the quarantine station, and attending surgeon at the Diamantina Orphanage. The Medical Society honoured him and his now prospering rival, Dr Bell, with honorary memberships.
But O’Doherty and his family never recovered from Parnell and Home Rule.
O’Reilly was disappointed with the contents of that first modest Home Rule Bill of 1886, the one which was defeated and helped destroy Saint Kevin. It had proposed to limit Irish control of education, ports and lighthouses, and though the Irish government would control the Metropolitan Police, the Royal Irish Constabulary would be still administered from Westminster. Above all, its legislation could be vetoed by the Lord Lieutenant, who was also to be the Chief Executive. Parnell accepted the draft bill as a first bid. But O’Reilly told Boston, and indeed America, that the proposed bill ‘says life and it enacts Death … it grants the parliament of the people and empowers a chamber of press and landlords to veto their proceedings.’
For his stance, O’Reilly was much attacked by various Irish members, including some whom he had recently warmly welcomed to Boston. And so in Ireland the questions remained independence and land, while in America the questions were to do with labour and the industrial misery of the Atlantic north-east. The blossoming of American capital since the Civil War, O’Reilly believed, was the greatest peril to the society he lived in. But even in America he saw Land League principles serving as a model. He wrote with increasing regularity on profit-sharing by employees, and the establishment of boards of arbitration to determine where profit ended and wage fairness began. If such arbitration processes could work for tenant farmers in Ireland, why could they not operate for American labourers? Early in his Pilot career, he had argued the best response for workmen and women was to create stores and co-operatives of their own, ‘and meet the masters on their own ground by becoming masters themselves.’ On account of the ‘irresponsible tyranny’ of proprietors, he raised the concept, blasphemous to capital, of nationalising the Pennsylvania coal-mining companies, and of government control of railroads. ‘Paternalism supported by state power is better than capital monopoly upheld by the private mercenaries whom Pinkerton lets up to the service of the money kings,’ he wrote in 1883. His radicalism and conservatism were equally patchy, but behind both lay a humane voice; one raised not least for the natives of America.
Compared to Thomas Francis Meagher, who years earlier beheld the Flathead Indian reservations and considered them too large, O’Reilly was appalled at the dispossession of America’s indigenes. This tendency manifested itself as early as 1873, when Captain Jack, chief of the Modocs of California, had surrendered to the United States Army in 1873 after some bitter engagements in the lava beds on the California-Oregon border. He had earlier killed United States General Edward Canby near Lake Tule, and retired with his people to a complex of lava caves and outcrops called the Stronghold, from which he was forced out by lack of water. After his hanging, the Pilot protested the removal of the Modocs to inferior, harsh land over the Oregon border, wher
e they had been made to live on a reservation with their ancestral enemy, the Klamath Indians. It was not to be wondered if they again broke out and fought to remain on their traditional grounds, said O’Reilly. These arguments were not popular in the booming, westering nation, with its theological certainty of its right of possession. O’Reilly urged his Irish readers, who were sometimes the most clamorous for vengeance, to be compassionate. ‘We have too much and too old a sympathy with people badly governed, to join in this shameful cry for Modoc blood.’ After the Custer massacre in 1876, he described the policy of the Indian Bureau as ‘methodistic cant, its protection high-handed coercion, its object plunder; and its results disgrace and death of the Indians.’ Later in his life, when the infamous Dawes Act was passed in 1887, breaking up the tribal structures and offensive Indian ‘communism,’ and taking good land in return for ‘allotments’ of marginal country granted to each male, O’Reilly published a letter of protest from the Lakota Chief Red Cloud, and supported it with an editorial.
The British Empire had in the meantime not forgotten O’Reilly, his treachery, escape and associations. When he was invited to Ottawa to deliver the St Patrick’s Day address for 1885, he declined the invitation for fear of embarrassing his hosts, given—as he put it—that he was ‘self-amnestied.’ But he did write to the Secretary of State of Canada, asking if his American citizenship would protect him from arrest if he went to Canada. The Canadians would need to refer the question to the British Home Secretary in any case, so at the advice of friends in the Irish Party in the House of Commons, he also wrote to the Home Secretary, Lord Harcourt, asking could he safely go to Canada. A British bureaucrat replied that Lord Harcourt ‘cannot accede to the request.’ Thomas Sexton, a member who had been imprisoned with Parnell, made a dazzling speech in the Commons in favour of an amnesty for both James Stephens and John Boyle O’Reilly. ‘Mr Boyle O’Reilly, whom he had the pleasure to meet lately at Boston, was a gentleman of very high personal qualities and of the rarest intellectual gifts, and during the years of his residence in America he had made such good use of his powers that he now filled the position of co-proprietor … of one of the most important journals in the United States. Mr O’Reilly was one of the most influential men in the State of Massachusetts.’
The Great Shame: And the Triumph of the Irish in the English-Speaking World Page 85