-
Subject Index A-B
-
Subject Index C-F
-
Subject Index G-K
-
Subject Index L-O
-
Subject Index P-Z
Email: info@searcs-web.com
|
|
Email: info@searcs-web.com |
|
Searc's Web Guide to
19th Cenutry Ireland - Walter Cox (1770-1837)
Walter Cox was born in County Meath and educated in a hedge-school 'within the large Elm tree at Ballyfadden, near Longwood, County Meath under the tutelage of Bryan McGarry, philomath'. Cox was apprenticed to a Dublin gunsmith and in 1792 he held command of the 2nd Company of the Dublin Goldsmiths' Corps of Volunteers. Cox then became a journalist and founded the Union Star in 1797. He is also believed to have been one of Lord Edward Fitzgerald's body guards during the 1798 Rising. In 1800 Cox travelled to America, Nova Scotia and to England before returning to Ireland in 1807 to found the Irish Magazine in which he frequently incensed the government. Cox was first imprisoned in 1810 when he received a sentence of three years and four months for seditious libel. He was imprisoned in Newgate Prison, Dublin and on his release continued to publish the Irish Magazine. In 1815 Cox was offered a government pension provided he leave Ireland and in 1816 he travelled to America where he lived for a number of years before moving to France. While in exile Cox wrote a play The Widow Dempsey's Funeral (1822) and an attack on Daniel O'Connell entitled The Cuckoo Calendar (1833). In 1835 Cox forfeited his pension and returned to Ireland where he died impoverished in Dublin two years later. This extract is one of the many footnotes to Cox's poem Tears of Erin for which he was imprisoned in 1810.© She bows obsequious to a foreign yoke!* *This remark must be admitted by all those who are at all acquainted with the history of Ireland and the kingdom under whose domination she was doomed to languish. England has always been the object of fraud; Ireland of direct and open violence; England has been cheated; Ireland, whose undistinguished oppressions have rendered her a constant hot bed for the satellites of tyranny, has been subjected to systematic robbery and peculation. One uniform plan, DIVISION, has been carried on in both. England amid mock contentions for liberty and real ones for plunder, vainly imagined herself in the possession of substantial liberty; but sacrificed as Ireland has been, to the ambition of her mistress, the idea of her being treated as a free country, was too gross to be obtruded on the meanest understanding. In England the party squabbles between Whig and Tory (whose political opinions admit of no distinction) have been assiduously fermented and the people have been divided about the shadow till they lost the substance; whilst in Ireland from the corrupting, disuniting, debilitating interference of the sister country, our provinces remain in ignorance of each other and the distinctions of religious persuasion have been erected by prejudice into brazen walls of separation. The plan of oppression was systematically directed throughout both countries to the same object, though in apparent opposition. In England the veil of fraud was necessary to swindle the people out of large sums, Specie republicae under a plausible pretext of public necessity; In Ireland revenue was only raised to be lavished in unmerited pensions without the insult of pretended national advantage. Thus has Ireland been at all times the object of open undisguised oppression. The system of conquest, which gathers the fruit by cutting down the tree; the system of taxation, which withdraws the manure from the roots; the system of political monopoly which impedes the vegetation, or occasions such partial circulation of vital juice as is seen to bloom and blossom in the midst of barrenness and decay; all these systems, rendering the great tree of society sapless and unproductive, have been successively practised in Ireland and are finally resolvable into that inveterate contempt of the Irish people, which, between the sister countries, as they are called, has ever counteracted and must ever counteract the establishment of free, equal and reciprocal society. A great change is necessary and regardless from what quarter it may come - J' acceptoroi le bien public des mains d'Arimaine meme. © Searc's Web Guide 1997-2008 |
|
|