From The United Irishman, January 10, 1885.
“London Bridge is broken down,
“Grand!” said the little bee.
London Bridge is broke down,
Fair la-dye!”
Our friends in London have sent us some of the London papers, and we give the benefit of them to our readers this week. London Bridge is broken down – so broken that the architects say it will have to be taken down entirely and rebuilt.
“Below the low-water mark,” says the London Telegraph, “the greatest injury has been done to the masonry, and the fact that the solid granite has been made to bulge out two feet, and that a large crack extends six feet down to the very foundations of the pier, is alone enough to reveal the magnitude of the shock which the bridge was called upon to withstand. It will be known, we trust, today, whether any really serious damage has been done, so as to weaken the stability of the ancient and massive viaduct across the Thames.”
We sympathize with the poor people on the banks of the Thames; they have much sympathy for our poor people, whom they have been plundering and murdering for hundreds of years, whom they drove to the coffin ships, and to the coffinless graves, and then gave thanks to the great God that they were at last exterminated with a vengeance. We pray to God, too, for a return of this vengeance on the heads of our destroyers, and we pray to our people for help for the missioners of this vengeance. The London Telegraph (Gladstone’s organ) calls these missioners of Irish vengeance “criminals;” we call them patriots; and the history of this war – the history that will yet record the emancipation of Ireland, will record them as heroes of liberty.
“Like all their tribe,” says the Telegraph, “these criminals were exceedingly anxious to save their own skins from the effect of the explosion which they knew must follow in a few seconds.”
A pity they did not wait to be blown up or wait to be caught! “He who fights and runs away will live to fight another day,” and it is very possible and very probably England will hear from those men again. We promise her she will – that is, unless she withdraws her robbing, murdering forces from Ireland. The Irish people have their eyes opened now. They have at their command the “Resources of Civilization,” those resources that Gladstone threatened Parnell with a few short years ago. Dynamite, notwithstanding all the Coercion acts that England has passed against it, can be seized by the Irish people as well as by the English people, and can be hurled by them with hellfire forces against the castles, bridges and battlements of England. Hurl it they will; to that England may make up her mind, and if she would save herself from the destruction that is in store for her – a destruction of which she is now only getting a warning – she will immediately set to work to allow Ireland to govern her own destinies.