Standish O'Grady; selected essays and passages

26o STANDISH O'GRADY
foully shirked. This is the key, and this alone is the key
which will unlock the divine gates, and loose for them the
breath of life.
Without solicitation from you, now from this county,
now from that, brought back miraculously to life by you,
brave men like yourself, the charm undone, will start as
if from tombs and do likewise, hearing your cry as on the
ears of runaway soldiers strikes the cry of the standard-
bearer, hidden amid the ranks of the foe, the call, not of
an orator or a writer, but of a man quitting himself like a
man in a man's work, bearing the standard, facing death
with the standard in his hand. Here and there all Ire-
land over will arise, never doubt it, men whose voices will
not be heard on platforms, or whose letters seen in the
newspapers, and who will give politics and politicians a very
wide berth indeed. A very ugly animal is the politician.
" Fcenum habet in cornu." Mad, my masters, or worse.
By degrees you will find out your true friends, or they will
find out you, with much mutual help arising out of the
recognition and much mutual encouragement. If one
is overwhelmed by local anarchy, the spirit of mutiny
and disorder too strong for him, you will send your trained
men to help him, or he will do the same for you ; or you
will help each other in funds or otherwise, gradually
combining, coalescing, join together under central control.
Though you and they should perish, as sure as God lives,
your work will not ;
though your bodies be riddled with
bullets or your brains strewn on the earth from the spades
of savage hinds, be sure that no bullet can end its life
or savage hinds destroy. So felt and so worked the old