I have often come home after seeing that on the side of the oppressor
was power--the power of bayonets--and that the poor had no helper, until
I could not sleep for pain and could only cry to our Father--theirs and
mine--How long, Lord, how long!
A friend described to me quite gaily a scene at the Castlebar workhouse
during the last famine, when the starving creatures coming for relief
surged round the workhouse gate and pressed and hustled and trampled
down one another, how the police standing ankle deep in mud had to lay
about them with their batons, and the poor creatures were sent home
again, and yet again, until they would learn to keep order--keep order--
and they were starving!
A lady in Clones, who was talking to me on Sabbath School work and
missionary enterprise in a highly edifying manner, could only express
her surprise about the poor of her own people who were doomed to the
poor house, that they did not go in at once without struggle or fuss.
And yet she had been a mother, and must have known what parting with
children meant to a mother's heart. For my part I sympathized with that
mother of whom I read in the papers, who was taken before a magistrate
and sentenced for making a disturbance in the workhouse when she heard
the master beating her child.
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