File 17 - Letters to Patrick Pearse from John Meritt

Letters to Patrick Pearse from John Merritt, Naval Office, Custom House, New York. The letters refer to Pearse’s efforts to raise funds for St. Enda’s School and to Merrit’s thoughts on the nature of the education system in Ireland. The letter of 20 April 1914 refers to Pearse’s attendance at a meeting in Celtic Park in New York. It reads ‘The unprovoked, senseless, brutal, and cowardly physical assault to which you were subjected at Celtic Park yesterday, within a radius of twenty five feet of me, and in which, I believe, two of your teeth were knocked out, has filled me with disgust at the strange, incomprehensible and fiendish actions of some of my misguided countrymen’. One of the letters is incomplete (the upper portion has been torn away).