history, before we exasperate and arouse bitter animosities, let us try
and do justice to our sister land. Abolish once and for all the land
laws, which in their iniquitous operation have ruined her peasantry.
Sweep away the leech-like Church which has sucked her vitality, and has
given her back no word even of comfort in her degradation. Turn her
barracks into flax mills, encourage a spirit of independence in her
citizens, restore to her people the protection of the law, so that they
may speak without fear of arrest, and beg them to plainly and boldly
state their grievances. Let a commission of the best and wisest amongst
Irishmen, with some of our highest English judges added, sit solemnly
to hear all complaints, and then let us honestly legislate, not for the
punishment of the discontented, but to remove the causes of the
discontent. It is not the Fenians who have depopulated Ireland's
strength and increased her misery. It is not the Fenians who have
evicted tenants by the score. It is not the Fenians who have checked
cultivation. Those who have caused the wrong at least should frame the
remedy."

In December, 1867, I sailed out of the safe harbour of my happy and
peaceful girlhood on to the wide sea of life, and the waves broke
roughly as soon as the bar was crossed. We were an ill-matched pair, my
husband and I, from the very outset; he, with very high ideas of a
husband's authority and a wife's submission, holding strongly to the
"master-in-my-own-house theory," thinking much of the details of home
arrangements, precise, methodical, easily angered and with difficulty
appeased. I, accustomed to freedom, indifferent to home details,
impulsive, very hot-tempered, and proud as Lucifer. I had never had a
harsh word spoken to me, never been ordered to do anything, had had my
way smoothed for my feet, and never a worry had touched me. Harshness
roused first incredulous wonder, then a storm of indignant tears, and