Page:A Memorial of John Boyle O'Reilly from the City of Boston.djvu/49

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MEETING IN TREMONT TEMPLE.
43

Irish Brigade come from the Second Army Corps to his relief.

In some ways Boyle O'Reilly was not enough of a reformer for me. I never could quite forgive him for not being like my friend and his associate, Colonel Taylor, a strong advocate of woman suffrage. But I can tell you that when the man who is doing two men's work all day still spends night after night in attending the invalid wife to whom he owes so much, and when, in making his last will, he has the courage and the justice to leave that wife the undisturbed possession of all his property and the executrix of his will, I am ready to sign an amnesty with him on the woman suffrage question.

And on other questions that lie before us in the future—on the questions that are gathering behind all the present questions and that bid fair to give the next generation a harder problem, much harder to solve than the mere question of slavery, Boyle O'Reilly is lost at the beginning of a contest where his fire and his judgment will greatly be regretted.

It is not for nothing that, as the last generation grew up reading Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin," so this generation grows up reading Edward Bellamy and listening to Henry George, and wondering where it is all to end.

We none of us know where it is to end. We