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JOHN BOYLE O'REILLY.
nairn, his name Hugh Rose. Rose had been a general in the English army at the time of the Indian mutiny; he was subsequently commander-in-chief of the forces in Ireland, at the time when O'Reilly was a soldier in the Tenth Hussars. Of him O'Reilly wrote:
This was the cold-blooded wretch who adopted or originated the dreadful plan of blowing the Sepoy prisoners from the mouths of cannon. Thousands of brave men were thus destroyed. The deepest devilishness of the thing consisted not in the horror of the death, but in the fact that the Hindoos regarded such a death as barring the soul from heaven forever. The process of the wholesale murder was as follows, as described by eye-witnesses. A man was chained facing the muzzle of the cannon, the mouth of the piece against the center of his body; and behind him were bound nine men, close together, all facing toward the gun. At one horrible day's slaughter, forty pieces of artillery were occupied for hours. The discharge of the gun blew the ten men to shreds; and the assembled multitude of Indian witnesses had an illustration of English vengeance that was calculated to insure submission.
In the days of the Fenian excitement in Ireland, Sir Hugh Rose was transferred from India to that country; and in 1865, when the Fenian insurrection was daily looked for, this military ruffian publicly paraded his brutal request to be "allowed to deal with the Irish as he had dealt with the Sepoys." Had an opportunity offered, the meaning of his transfer from ravaged India would have been made as clear as blood in Ireland. But he has died without this added glory, and the days are fast passing when in the name of civilization such a monster could be let loose on a patriotic people defending their lives and homes.
A great meeting was held in Paneuil Hall on October 20, in aid of the Irish Nationalist cause, Governor Robinson, Mayor O'Brien, Hon. F. O. Prince, and several other distinguished citizens making speeches. John Boyle O'Reilly delivered a spirited impromptu address as follows:
Sir, centuries before Christopher Columbus was born, this Irish cause was as vivid and as well defined as it is to-day. Speeches and meetings of Irishmen at any time, for nearly a thousand years, were representations of this meeting and our speeches to-night, and nothing could have kept that alive in our hearts but the repeated scattering of the life blood of our men over the soil of our country. We have made the soil of Ireland fat with sacrifice, and, thank the Lord, we are seeing
