Standish O'Grady; selected essays and passages

194 STANDISH O GRADY
incarnated Plutocratic principle—and who is governed
by two master passions, lust of gold, and of material
power—we come before him demanding the restitution,
upon a mighty scale, of that which is his life, and the
reform of a fiscal system which sustains his power. In
doing so, whether we use a threatening word or not, we
do in fact menace him with dim perils and the fear of
" new things " in his own house. We raise up for him
again the hundred-times-laid spectre of the intervention
of a united Ireland in his domestic affairs, a united Ireland
operating and acting in the very centre of his whole
Imperial system. Will he, being what we know him to
be, endure all this, when it needs but one touch of the
giant finger to reduce us once more to impotence ?
Will one hesitate to crush the stinging gnat ? For so he
will regard us while we exert against him only the force
which is ours according to paper.
Our quarrel with this dread being—the incarnated
genius of the British Plutocracy—is to the death. Has
anyone realized his dread attributes ? Let me give an
example. That noble-hearted Englishman, Mr. PlimsoU,
year by year, and for many years, sought to dissuade him
from the annual murder of British seamen by the thousand
in his overloaded and over-insured mercantile marine.
And he could not. Why ? Because the Plutocracy
loves gold, and takes no thought of men.
" A man shall be more precious than a wedge of gold."
That is the law, but it is not his law. His is the reverse.
" A wedge of gold shall be more precious than a man."
And the principle pervades his whole system of legislation,