--Some people, says Bloom, can see the mote in others' eyes but they can't
see the beam in their own.
--RAIMEIS, says the citizen. There's no-one as blind as the fellow that
won't see, if you know what that means. Where are our missing
twenty millions of Irish should be here today instead of four,
our lost tribes? And our potteries and textiles, the finest in
the whole world! And our wool that was sold in Rome in the time
of Juvenal and our flax and our damask from the looms of Antrim
and our Limerick lace, our tanneries and our white flint glass
down there by Ballybough and our Huguenot poplin that we have since
Jacquard de Lyon and our woven silk and our Foxford tweeds and ivory
raised point from the Carmelite convent in New Ross, nothing like it in
the whole wide world. Where are the Greek merchants that came through the
pillars of Hercules, the Gibraltar now grabbed by the foe of mankind, with
gold and Tyrian purple to sell in Wexford at the fair of Carmen? Read
Tacitus and Ptolemy, even Giraldus Cambrensis. Wine, peltries,
Connemara marble, silver from Tipperary, second to none, our farfamed
horses even today, the Irish hobbies, with king Philip of Spain offering
to pay customs duties for the right to fish in our waters. What do the
yellowjohns of Anglia owe us for our ruined trade and our ruined hearths?
And the beds of the Barrow and Shannon they won't deepen with millions
of acres of marsh and bog to make us all die of consumption?
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