I enjoy doing research. I also enjoy writing. What I really, really don't enjoy is editing. It is a head ache and, very often, a nightmare. I'm also generally stuck doing it myself. In that respect, it's a little like the old saying about a lawyer who goes to court pro se: A lawyer who represents himself in court has a fool for a client.
I bring this up because I have been going over my writing on the Jubilee Riot again. There are parts of it I thought were well done, if I do say so myself, but experience has taught me that whenever I think I have done something particularly well, I am almost invariably the only one. It is also very difficult for me to improve my clarity, because I already know what it was I was trying to say, and therefore my words are the very image of clear and concise writing. So cleaning up my long and sometimes bizarre sentence structures is taking a wee bit of time and also requires a lot of second guessing, which in my experience is also not a good thing.
But what bothers me the most about this piece is the ending. When I first wrote a short little essay on the riots I came up with a conclusion that this was a tremendous turning point in the history of Catholics within the city of Toronto- they fought for and won the right to be full citizens within the city, and the right to visibly and publicly Catholic in a very Protestant city. When I revisited the subject and did more research, I discovered it was really a bit more ambiguous than that. They won the right, it is true, but less than three years later they surrendered that right and retreated. They abandoned the St Patrick's Day Parade, their single most visible day in the city, and abandoned it for over a hundred years. When it returned it was a thoroughly secular event. When Bishop Walsh arrived to take his seat as Archbishop of Toronto his carriage was stoned by the Orangemen, as though nothing had changed. The Riots ultimately did not result in the Catholics becoming more visible, or taking their rights.
That all makes for a very unsatisfying ending to the story- it is scarcely and ending at all- and a story, even a history, needs to have an ending. If I could even say why it happened, that would be something. But I cannot find the reasons why. In 1876 the St Patrick's Day Parade was a fiery event, with Archbishop Walsh thundering from the pulpit at the Mass preceding the parade about Catholic Ireland, and demanding every man in the congregation stand, and raise their hand and swear an oath to not rest until Ireland achieved its home rule. Patrick Boyle, editor of The Irish Canadian published at great length about the St Patrick's Day in Ontario for weeks after the day itself, and then, suddenly, wondered why they were bothering with the banners and ribbons and the ridiculous accouterments of the parade. In 1878, the parade was cancelled, ostensibly due to a time of mourning over the death of Pius IX. Patrick Boyle again thundered from his paper that this was but an excuse, and all true Irishmen knew the real reason it was cancelled. Unfortunately, he never articulated that reason why. Nor would his enemies in the Orange Press.
And the ban on St Patrick's parades continued for years. My mother told me a story from the time of Neil McNeil, and how he was approached by a group of Irishmen who wanted to revive the parade in response to the Orangemen constantly marching through the Catholic parts of town on the Glorious Twelfth with their banners and ribbons, but McNeil refused to allow it. His reasons aren't obvious. Perhaps he did not wish to stir up trouble. Perhaps he felt their desire to use a holy day to strike a blow at their enemies was an abuse of the holy day itself. Perhaps a little of both, and something else as well. Once again, I don't know.
So that is where my conclusion stands: the Catholics won, then they retreated, and I don't know why. Not a satisfying ending in the slightest.
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