14 thoughts on “The Emancipator

  1. The Old Boy

    “I have no doubt whatever that, when he iceberg melts it will become an exceedingly tolerant country. The monuments are on the whole encouraging. I am thinking of O’Connell, Parnell, and Nelson. We never had any trouble about O’Connell. It was said about O’Connell, in his own day, that you could not throw a stick over a workhouse wall without hitting one of his children, but he believed in the indissolubility of marriage, and when he died his heart was very properly preserved in Rome. I am not quite sure whether it was in a bronze or marble urn, but it is there, and I have no doubt the art of that urn was as bad as the other art of the period.”

    -Senator W. B. Yeats, opposing the abolition of divorce in the Senate, 11th June 1925.

      1. cluster

        The authoritative biography on Yeats by Roy Foster suggests that although snobby and possibly authoritarian, Yeats was never actually a supporter of the Nazis nor was he anti-Semitic.

        Anyway, what was the point of your whatboutery? Even if he had become fascist in his later years (Yeats was about 68 when Hitler became Chancellor), does that mean that no previous observation or comment of his is worth mentioning in relation to anything else ever again?

  2. Grace

    I’ve often wondered about these huge meetings in the past -how did the crowd hear the speaker, in an era before microphones?
    Did DOC have an insanely loud carrying voice?!

    1. The Old Boy

      My understanding is that meetings largely dispersed by the time the speechifying actually begun. They were intended as large public displays of strength and no serious attempt was made to speak to fairly rowdy crowds of many thousands of people. Copies of the speeches were supplied to sympathetic newspapers and would be printed the next day.

      Some reports suggest that some of the meetings had men acting as relay speakers in the crowd, but this may be apocryphal.

    2. scottser

      i’m sure there were more than a few ‘blessed are the cheesemakers’ moments at those rallies..

  3. Clampers Outside!

    I like the chick headed monster on the bridge. If I was there… I’d’ve rode him round the castle and up the hill and told Daniel, he’s a ‘great lad for one lad’, and then I’d have got the chicken dragon to peck all the bad guys on the head and stuff, so I would, and shouted at them ‘listen you, Daniel’s talking’ and then shouted really, really loudly from on top of my chicken dragon ‘quiet you down the back’. And when the crowds dispersed I’d set up a ticketing system for all the horse and carts to get out of the field one by one and pay me a fee for parking there or my chicken dragon would peck them, so i would.
    THE END

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