● ● ● checker our country, wrought by Irishmen, who were driven cruelly from their native land, by abject poverty. Compelled to pay rent for that which is his own by right, taxed for the support of a government which does little else but multiply his wrongs, tithed for the support of a ministry he cannot hear preach,—he is kept like the drowning man who inhales the fresh draught, but to struggle, and sink, and rise and sink again.51
Now, in 1848, it seemed as though all tyranny were to be overthrown. Revolution swept through Europe. Bourbons tumbled and Hapsburgs trembled as names like Kossuth and Mazzini were caught up into the electric atmosphere. Soon enough it was all over: reaction triumphant, disillusionment rampant, liberalism driven to exile in America. In a poem “To General Cass” in the Patriot Mrs. Glover wrote:
From o’er the wave a wail of woe
Booms like the midnight gun;
And shall our free-born souls forego
Scorn for the Austrian crown,
In purple gore of martyrs dyed?
Life, liberty down-trod!
Brave Hungary, thy tears be dried,
Stretch forth thine arm to God!52
If we seem to catch here a prophetic glimpse of the founder of The Christian Science Monitor, it is only in the most general sort of way. Mrs. Glover was interested in the world around her but she was not yet ready to give herself to any cause.
There were causes enough to choose from. The great nineteenth-century wave of reform was daily gathering volume. A characteristic reformer of the day was Dorothea Dix, who in 1845 completed a ten-thousand-mile journey around the land, visiting jails, almshouses, state prisons, and other institutions to examine and expose the intolerably ● ● ●
51 [Mary M. Glover, “ ‘Erin, the Smile and the Tear in thine Eyes,’ ” The Covenant, September 1847, p. 409.]
52 Mary M. Glover, “To General Cass,” New Hampshire Patriot and State Gazette, 7 February 1850, p. 4.