Tumi (g ttimtitiiiiiiMtiiiiiiiittiiiiiH! OUNG IRELAND: A Fragment of Irish History. 1840-1850. BY ;IE CHAELES GAVA^ DUFFY, K.C.M.G. MSELL, FETTER, GALPIN & Co. LONDON, PARIS & NEW YORK. 1880. [ALL EIGHTS RESERVED.] PREFACE. I HAVE written this book in the intervals of a busy life, because I believed it was the best and last service I could render to Ireland. It contains a memoir of the public affairs of that country during a period of abnormal political activity ; a period to which may be traced, as to their fountain-head, many of the opinions now universally current among the Irish people. My first aim was to make a new generation familiar with the truthfulness, simplicity, and real moderation of the men with whom, it was said, "a new soul came into Ireland." The Young Ireland party, as their enemies in the first instance named them, and as they came in the end to name themselves, after having been long misrepresented, have in latter times been vindicated and applauded more than enough, but they have never I think been understood. What they aimed to do, and what they accomplished; their actual motives and their means of action, as disclosed in their private correspondence, and interpreted by one who shared their counsels, are set down in this book for the first time ; and will be found I think worthy of study by statesmen and publicists accustomed to meditate on the affairs of Ireland. Another aim, if I may venture to say so, was to appeal to the conscience of the best class of Englishmen. If they should think proper to study, with reasonable pains, the brief period em- braced in this narrative, they will have no difficulty, I am persuaded, in understanding a problem which has sometimes perplexed them why Irishmen not deficient in public spirit or probity were 2060793 iv PREFACE. eager to break away from the Union and from all connection with England. At present they see with amazement and dismay a whole people who profess to have no confidence in their equity, who proclaim that they do not expect fair play from them, and who fall into ecstacies of triumph over some disaster abroad or embarrassment at home which endangers or humiliates the Empire ; and they will not take the obvious means of compre- hending' this phenomenon. For whoever desires to understand why Ireland is distressed and discontented, while England is prosperous and loyal, must assuredly seek the causes in history ; to-day is the child and heir of yesterday. It is easy to compre- hend the loathing sensitive Englishmen feel in descending into the catacombs of the Past, and handling the skeletons and cerements of historic crimes ; but I invite them to look at trans- actions which are not remote or ghastly, which happened in their own day, for which they cannot altogether evade a per- sonal responsibility ; and to consider how far these transactions account for the state of Ireland at present. It is more than a generation since the events occurred which I have undertaken to record. A larger experience of mankind, the responsibilities of political office, and leisure for reflection, have, I trust, enabled me to scrutinise them from a new point of view, and to revise whatever was rash or ungenerous in earlier judgments. I have lived a quarter of a century among Englishmen, as their associate, colleague, or competitor, and I would not willingly wound their self-respect. But it would be a waste of life to write such a book as I have attempted, and abate or conceal the truth. I have striven to be fair and temperate, but I have not hidden away anything essential to be disclosed ; and I am convinced that confusion and disaster will continue to mark the relation between the islands, till English- men confront the facts courageously, and with a determination to discover the spring-head from which discord flows. I have given the narrative the form of personal recollections PREFACE. v because I speak of proceeding's which I have seen and shared ; and I desire to keep before the reader the fact that it is the testimony of an actor in the scenes, who cannot avoid personal sympathies and prejudices. But I have written at the circum- ference of half the globe from the scene of action, at a time when the chief actors are dead, and when I myself must soon follow them, and have no longer anything to ask or fear from fortune. The authorities for facts not within my own knowledge are indicated in the text or the notes. The most important contri- bution to them was the correspondence addressed to the Editor of the Nation by men of various classes and parties during the entire period treated of. To this collection has been added the voluminous correspondence addressed to Smith O'Brien and Thomas Davis, and the scantier correspondence preserved by John Dillon and Thomas MacNevin, entrusted to me by their respective families, the papers of Thomas Francis Meagher, which he gave me before leaving Ireland, the correspondence of Davis with Daniel Owen Maddyn, and the Minutes and Corre- spondence of the Irish Confederation, confided to me on the dissolution of that body. In this narrative O'Connell while he lived was necessarily a chief figure. His fame in all civilised countries, and the affec- tionate remembrance in which he is held in Ireland, bespeak a favourable interpretation for his conduct whenever it is in contro- versy. But it must not be forgotten that the young men who were for a time in conflict with him have since been scattered over the world by the blast of adversity, and have everywhere proved themselves to be men of honour and ability, men who were plainly entitled to be heard with patience in the counsels of their country, against any adversary. That the narrative may serve the purposes for which it was written, or any useful purpose, the first condition is that it shall be not only accurate, but just; and that it shall not be vi PREFACE. ungenerous in its justice. I have aimed to give it this character ; whenever there was question of motives, or of competing policies or of personal reputation, I have not slurred over the difficulty, but have as scrupulously striven to be fair as if I were engaged on a last confession. What I have written is at any rate what I profoundly believe to be true ; and time, I trust, will show that it contains little or nothing which any man can gainsay. The thoughtful reader will not fail to note that the narrative at bottom is not the history of certain men, but essentially the history of certain principles. Controversy, rather than meditation, is the nursing-mother of popular opinion ; and to the contro- versies and conflicts which I have undertaken to record may be traced back, for the most part, the opinions which influence the public mind of Ireland at present, or promise to influence it, in any considerable degree, among the generation now entering on public life. London, Oct., 1880. CONTENTS. 13oofe I. CHAPTER I. PAGK How THE REPEAL MOVEMENT BEGAN 1 CHAPTER II. How THE MOVEMENT PARED IN THE BEGINNING, AND WHAT O'CONNELL TAUGHT . 27 CHAPTER III. ITS FIRST NOTABLE EECRUITS . 44 CHAPTER IV. A BIRD'S-EYE VIEW OF IRISH HISTORY 81 CHAPTER V. TEACHING OF THE "NATION" 151 CHAPTER VI. THE CORPORATION DEBATE. THE CASE OF IRELAND . . . 191 CHAPTER VII. THE AWAKENING OF THE COUNTRY. THE MENACE OF THE GOVERNMENT THE ANSWER OF THE PEOPLE . . . . . , . 208 CHAPTER VIII. THE FIRST STROKE OF THE GOVERNMENT, AND THE COUNTER STROKE . 244 CHAPTER IX. YOUNG IRELAND AT WORK. THE COUNCIL OF THREE HUNDRED . . 278 CHAPTER X. A FOREIGN POLICY FOR IRELAND 315 CHAPTER XI. MUSTER OF THE NATION AT TARA AND MULLAGHMAST .... 344 CHAPTER XII. THE CLONTARF MEETING PROHIBITED. ARREST OF THE LEADERS . 359 viii CONTENTS. tfoofe . CHAPTER I. PAGE HOW O'CONNELL WAS TRIED 389 CHAPTER II. How HE WAS CONVICTED 415 CHAPTER III. WHAT PARLIAMENT AND ENGLISH REFORMERS THOUGHT OF THE TRIAL. THE SENTENCE . ...... . . . . 441 CHAPTER IV. O'CONNELL IN GAOL. YOUNG IRELAND IN CONCILIATION HALL . . 475 CHAPTER Y. THE IRISH PRISONERS BEFORE THE HOUSE OF LORDS. THEIB DELIVERANCE , . . , . 510 Eoofe III. CHAPTER I. IRISH PARTIES AFTER O'CONNELL'S DELIVERANCE . . . . . 530 CHAPTER II. RECREATIONS OF THE YOUNG IKELANDERS 554 CHAPTER in. THE FEDERAL CONTROVERSY . . . . ' . . . . . 575 CHAPTER IY. RELIGIOUS INTRIGUES, AT HOME AND ABROAD .' . > . . . 610 CHAPTER Y. PEEL'S CONCESSIONS TO IRELAND ' ; . . 631 CHAPTER YI. THE WORKSHOP OF YOUNG IRELAND 657 CHAPTER VII. THE PROVINCIAL COLLEGES 684 CHAPTER VIII. THE OPPOSITION TO THE BILL. . 71 S CHAPTER IX. THE VICE-TRIBUNATE OF JOHN O'CONNELL . . . . . . 73C CHAPTER X. THE DEATH OF DAVIS ... . . .745 YOUNG IRELAND. 38ook I* CHAPTER I. HOW THE REPEAL MOVEMENT BEGAN. IN the spring of the year 1840 an event occurred in Ireland charged with grave and far-reaching conse- quences, but which, at the time, attracted slight notice, chiefly of a mocking or contemptuous sort. Daniel O'Connell had long been the idol of his countrymen; but popularity is a tide whose ebb though irregular is inevitable, and at this time it ran low with the popular tribune. - He had reached the age of decay, being midway between his sixtieth and seventieth year ; his mind had been much disturbed of late by public and private cares, and his career for many years past had not been graced by any conspicuous success. It was under these circumstances that he suddenly invited the Irish nation to unite with him in the formidable task of repealing the legislative union between Great Britain and Ireland. The Union, which had lasted for more than a generation, had been repeatedly assailed before; first by the party of Protestant Ascendancy, and again and again by the Catholics; and he proposed that the 2 YOUNG IRELAND. discontent of the nation, which slumbered for long in- tervals but had never become quite extinct, should be awakened once more, and guided to its aim, this time, by a political association an agency which had more than once played a decisive part in the recent history of the country. A national demand made by one who was indisput- ably leader of the great bulk of his nation, has seldom been framed under circumstances more unpromising. In political movements nothing is more embarrassing than a false start, and O'Connell had already made a false start. Ten years earlier, while his recent triumph in the long contest for Catholic Emancipation surrounded his name with a halo of invincibility, he had made a similar appeal to the country ; and at the general election of 1832 nearly half the representatives chosen for Ireland were pledged " Repealers," as the advocates of a national Parliament came to be called.* No capacity or services were sufficient to secure the election> of a candidate, in the larger constituencies, who did not share the desire of the country for self- government. But in two or three years he abandoned this purpose, in order to propose to the English people the alternative of establishing what was called " equal justice," that is to say, laws and an executive in Ireland as free from deliberate party bias as they were in England and Scotland. At the same time several of the liepeal members relinquished their seats to accept appointments under the system which they had recently * The numbers were 40 out of 105. HOW THE REPEAL MOVEMENT BEGAN. 3 been pledged to overthrow. This acceptance of office, however, did not outrage the popular feeling as it would have done at a later period. Catholic Emancipation had only recently become law, and there was a natural desire to see Catholics occupying places of authority, from which they had been excluded since the Revolution of 1688. For a time every appointment of a Catholic was welcomed as a new triumph over Protestant Ascen- dancy, and a new security for the fairer administration of law, and of the public departments. But this senti- ment succumbed in a great degree to the enthusiasm for nationality, and O'Connell seriously disturbed the con- fidence even of devoted adherents, when he permitted his son and his sons-in-law to exchange the office of popular representative for that of functionary under the British Government. The mass of the people had not lost faith in him, either on this account or in conse- quence of his abrupt change of policy ; they were per- suaded that he was doing what he believed best for their interest ; but many of them had utterly lost faith in Repeal of the Union, and regarded the occasional demand of it merely as a weapon nourished in the face of England to extort other concessions. This was the result of the false start. The period at which he took up the question anew, was calculated to deepen such suspicions. During the latter half of the six years which followed the abandon- ment of the first Repeal movement, O'Connell had been a close parliamentary ally of the Whig party ; vindicating his preference for them by the purer administration of B 2 4 YOUNG IRELAND. justice and the fairer distribution of patronage which they established in Ireland. As they were plainly about to fall from power in 1840, to make way for the second administration of Sir Eobert Peel, the announcement that the Repeal agitation would be immediately renewed, was suspected by many to be a device for embarrassing the coming administration in the interest of the Whigs. And O'Connell himself, though he maintained his authority over the bulk of the people nearly unimpaired, was no longer the formidable tribune of 1832. In the ten years since Emancipation he had paid the progres- sive tax which envy punctually levies on eminence, in being constantly maligned. He had been the chief in- strument in overthrowing a sectarian ascendancy which during five generations gave a small minority of the nation all the power and patronage of the State ; and of those who had lost this monopoly many could not for- give him. He had competed successfully with the landed gentry for the political control which they had long exercised at elections, and from time to time had menaced their feudal exactions as landowners with par- liamentary scrutiny; and they had come instinctively to hate and resist everything in which he was con- cerned. These might be regarded as the natural ene- mies of a popular tribune ; but his natural allies were nearly as ill prepared for the new movement. He had excited the animosity of the organised trades by denouncing trade combinations ; and the enthusiasm of the peasantry was somewhat abated by constant appeals HOW THE REPEAL MOVEMENT BEGAN. 5 made to them by his enemies to note the fact, that though Catholic squires got seats in Parliament and Catholic barristers got silk gowns and ermine capes, no appreciable benefit had descended on the farm-houses or cabins. The necessary staff-officers of a national agita- tion were still more difficult to obtain than the rank and file. His chief associates in the Catholic agitation had long ago grown cold and fallen off, and they were replaced by inferior men, or their places left vacant. And his enemies, in the class from which such officers are usually drawn, were constantly augmented by a caustic criticism on public affairs. Criticism was one of the duties of his position as a national tribune ; but in truth he liked the task when the duty was not very clear. That he should be subjected to rancorous reprisals was in the nature of things ; and he often furnished plausible occasion by a strong man's dis- regard of appearances. Two instances, then quite re- cent, will illustrate the sort of charges which he had to meet, and which however effectually met thinned the rank of gentlemen around him. Mr. Raphael, Ex-Sheriff of London, a prosperous Armenian trades- man, whom O'Connell had recommended as a can- didate to an Irish county, having lost his seat before a Parliamentary Committee, charged his patron with having attempted to make money by the election, and with having afterwards offered to procure him a baronetcy from the Whig Government, as the price of silence on the transaction. A select committee acquitted O'Connell of having had any 6 YOUNG IRELAND. pecuniary interest in the election ; but the controversy created a deep dislike in Ireland to the system of nominating obscure strangers to be Irish representatives, and to the relations towards an English Cabinet which made it possible to offer a baronetcy as a solatium to the defeated candidate ; for of this part of the story there was no question. The popular press was blind and vehement in its defence of the transaction in all its details, but it was not unusual to hear influential adherents whisper, that when the farmers of Carlow were induced to defy their arbitrary landlords at the hustings, it ought to have been for some higher pur- pose than to procure a title for a successful Cockney confectioner.* The other incident happened in Ireland and was more disastrous in its consequences. The renewed Repeal movement had been immediately pre- ceded by a political organisation called the Precursor Society a name which implied that unless equal justice was conceded by Parliament the society was only the "precursor" to a demand for self-government. Mr. Peter Purcell, an opulent stage-coach proprietor, and a country gentleman of considerable property, who was a conspicuous member of this body, suddenly resigned on the ground that he had in vain endeavoured to persuade O'Connell to allow the funds of the society to rest in the hands of the Treasurer and Trustees ostensibly appointed to take charge of them, instead of being lodged in a country branch bank to his personal credit. * The Raphael correspondence was spread over the latter half of 1836, four years before the establishment of the Repeal Association. > HOW THE REPEAL MOVEMENT BEGAN. 7 Jn truth O'Connell who was treated on the footing of an absolute sovereign by his immediate political adhe- rents thought, and was to a large extent justified in thinking, that the funds were subscribed because he asked for them, and were intended to be spent at his discretion. Had he openly proclaimed and acted on this conviction, it is probable that the subscriptions would not have been seriously diminished in amount ; but acting upon it not only without proclaiming it, but while publicly repudiating it as a calumny, had alien- ated many important supporters, who now either stood coldly apart or had gone with Mr. Purcell into active opposition.* A more serious difficulty confronted him in the fact that the Catholic Clergy who had been the local ex- ecutive of all his past associations, had now special ground for doubt and distrust. There were nearly three thousand priests in Ireland, an enormous staff, if they could .be enlisted in the cause. But it was extremely doubtful. Nearly ten years earlier O'Connell had placed himself at the head of a move- ment which sprang up in the midland counties, and rapidly spread over three provinces, to abolish tithe ; tithe being an impost levied in a great part off Catholic peasants who were not able to afford them- selves dwellings or food fit for human beings, to support a church whose Bishops accumulated fortunes as colossal * Mr. PurcelPs letter was published in January, 1839, and the con- troversy arising out of it had scarcely closed when the Repeal Association was founded. 8 YOUNG IRELAND. in amount and almost as iniquitous in their origin as the fortunes of Roman proconsuls. The hatred of tithe among the Catholic people was fierce and uni- sal, and many of the Protestant landowners were not unwilling to encourage this sentiment, probably regard- ing the prodigal revenues of the Establishment as so much deducted from their natural right to the entire earnings of their tenantry. The resistance speedily became formidable; the peasantry of Leinster and Mun- ster were pledged in public meetings never again to pay the "accursed impost." Cattle seized for tithe arrears could find no purchasers ; attempts to make seiz- ures were in several cases resisted ; a number of the malcontents were shot by the police under circum- stances which provoked bitter wrath ; and finally a party of police engaged in a tithe seizure were fallen upon and massacred by the people. The clergy of the Established Church were in sore distress during this protracted struggle, their entire income in some cases having been suddenly withdrawn. The Government that carried Parliamentary Reform, confident in its great power and popularity attempted to dispose of the difficulty. An act was passed which authorised a loan of a million for the immediate relief- of the clergy and transferred to the Executive Govern- ment the duty of collecting the arrears which they claimed. But to collect the arrears was a task beyond the power even of a popular Government. Gaols were soon filled with prisoners arrested for trifling amounts, often not exceeding a shilling ; sometimes not exceeding HOW TEE REPEAL MOVEMENT BEGAN. 9 a penny ; but the result of these vigorous measures was not reassuring. The costs of suits was found to exceed in the proportion of two to one the amount of tithe re- covered. And the men imprisoned were regarded as martyrs, and some who died were voted public funerals by the Precursor Society, and passed through an entire province followed by mourning crowds from the gaol to the grave. A considerable party of English Reformers acknowledged the reasonableness of the Irish movement, and advocated the immediate or gradual disendowment of the Protestant Establishment; and successive Govern- ments attempted to settle the question by some method of compromise. Ten bishoprics were suppressed, and Church rates were relinquished, as an instalment of the justice demanded. At this stage of the contest it is not surprising that to many in Ireland the abolition of tithe seemed certain and near. At length, in 1838, Lord Melbourne carried a measure into law which changed the tithe levied from the occupiers of land, into a rent-charge, payable in the first instance by the landowners ; that powerful class being rewarded for their acquiescence by an abatement of twenty-five per cent of the original amount, and by being empowered to recover their advances from their tenants in the same manner as rent. To give tithe a new tenure under another name, and to compel Catholic landowners to become tithe proctors for the Established Church, was not a triumphant termination of a national struggle in which time and money and human life had been prodigally spent ; and as O'Connell had acquiesced in 10 YOUNG IRELAND. this compromise he was held largely responsible for its odious conditions. Mr. Sharman Crawford, a Protestant of liberal fortune and democratic opinions, who had lent his aid in Parliament and the press to overthrow the tithe system, went to one of O'Connell's meetings in Dublin and charged him, face to face, with having sac- rificed the interests of Ireland to the convenience of the Whig Government. And Father Davern, a Tipperary priest of remarkable courage and ability, published a series of trenchant letters, holding him directly respon- sible for the disappointment of the national hopes. It may well be doubted whether tithe could have been abolished or the Church disestablished by any par- liamentary action in the state of English opinion at that period ; but under a great disappointment men do not reason liberally, and many of his former adherents, especially among the Catholic clergy, to whom the Establishment was a constant insult and menace, were indisposed to embark with him in another undertaking so soon after the humiliating issue of what was known as the Tithe War.* The difficulties of his task will not be justly esti- mated if we leave out of account the fact that a new political association founded by O'Connell was a phe- nomenon which had long ceased to excite either lively hope or fear. Since the concession of Catholic Emanci- pation there had constantly been a popular organisation in Dublin for the redress of Irish grievances, holding its * See note at the end of the chapter on O'Connell, Sharman Crawford and Father Davern. HOW THE REPEAL MOVEMENT BEGAN. 11 meetings at the Corn Exchange, tfye head-quarters of the famous Catholic Association. At one time it was an anti-Whig at another an anti-Tory Society ; and although this constant watchfulness was in truth the necessary price of the few concessions won with immense difficulty from an unfriendly parliament, it had not produced much visible result: and it was easy for un- generous critics to represent that Irish grievances like the stock scenes of a theatre were kept in reserve, to be exhibited or withdrawn, shifted and replaced, with a view merely to sustain the interest of the audience, and the profit of the management. None of these impediments however was so em- barrassing as one springing directly from O'Connell's alliance with the Whigs. The singleness of purpose which had honourably distinguished Catholic gentlemen in their contest for religious liberty had become im- paired by the habit of receiving favours from the Government, and .they were less willing than of old to consider exclusively the public interest. The test to which Christianity was subjected when, coming out of the catacombs and deserts, she found herself the guest of courts and the hostage of conquerors, was repeated on a smaller scale among a people who, having for five generations only known authority as an enemy, were at length admitted at times to sit at its feasts. The new organisation which he proceeded to found, took a shape which strengthened these objections and suspicions, by seeming to exhibit a secret want of faith in his professed object. The Eepeal Association proposed 12 YOUNG IRELAND. not merely to dissolve the Union, but to abolish tithe, which had just been re-established, to procure fixity of tenure for land holders, and for the democracy no less than four of the five points of the Charter demanded by the working classes in England, extension of the suf- frage, shorter Parliaments, no property qualification, and equal electoral districts. This programme was scarcely compatible, it was contended, with the design of bringing to a speedy end the legislative connection with England, or even with the design of uniting in one body the Irishmen who agreed in desiring a domestic parliament. It was certain there were national Conservatives who were not friendly to a low franchise or to equal electoral districts, and national Protestants who would not consent to abolish tithe, and there were as certainly men agreeing with O'Connell on these points whom the abandonment of the Repeal contest half-a-dozen years before had rendered so sore and suspicious, that they would be sure to hold aloof from an association with such conflicting purposes. Outside his habitual supporters the nation was not in a frame of mind favourable to such an appeal. In Ireland, every class of the community, except the great officers of the civil and ecclesiastical establish- ments, were poorer than the corresponding class in any country in Europe. It was a rare thing to meet with a family in the middle rank, who were not struggling to keep up appearances; the landed gentry had been extravagant, and were paying the penalty in debt and embarrassment; professional incomes had HOW THE REPEAL MOVEMENT BEGAN. 13 been sinking year by year since the Union, and at this time the large class engaged in trade were dis- quieted by the occurrence of a commercial crisis. The Dublin merchants had once been eager politicians, they had thronged the ranks of the Volunteers of '82, who dictated a constitution to Parliament ; and of the Orange organisation which dictated a policy to the Government since the Union. Merchants had been the most aspiring and independent section of the Catholic community during the struggle for religious liberty; commerce being the only pursuit in which Catholics had an open field. Up to the coming of O'Connell they had furnished all the efficient leaders, and some of them, like John Keogh, were men of large capacity and resources. But their sons and successors had seen agitation after agitation begin and end without com- mensurate results ; and at this time a merchant would almost as soon have gone into the Insolvent Court, as into the Corn Exchange. The Protestant gentry who considered the Union as the bulwark of the Established Church and of the land code framed in their interest, were scornfully hostile to any attempt to disturb it. Their fathers had resisted the Union in the name of the Protestant Constitution which they administered, but the rise of the Catholic people to political equality alarmed them for the monopolies which they still enjoyed, and they repudiated their hereditary opinions. The younger Catholic gentry who in many instances had been educated in English schools, and who had just begun to taste official favours, regarded O'Connell 14 YOUNG IRELAND. as an instrument useful to secure seats in Parliament and to squeeze patronage from the Castle, but otherwise a person of vulgar manners. They never felt secure that he would not outrage their timorous code of etiquette by unmeasured personal sarcasm on his oppo- nents, or their sense of propriety by some vehement complaint or demand on the part of the country which could not be sanctioned in good society. That a long excluded class should be ambitious was natural ; but in general they were only shabbily ambitious ; eager to be magistrates and grand jurors, and to be remembered on festive occasions by the vice-regal aide-de-camp, when they might have aspired to possess and rule their native country. Their fathers had furnished few and timid recruits to the movement for Catholic Emancipation, and now there was not one conspicuous country gentle- man, Catholic or Protestant, to be seen in the Corn Exchange. The Irish bar had once been the nursery of statesmen and patriots ; but since the Union its national spirit had gradually evaporated. During the Catholic struggle to be an anti-Catholic was supposed to imply peculiar devotion to the Empire, and national sentiments were a complete disqualification to profes- sional promotion. Mr. Sheil, Mr. Woulfe, afterwards Chief Baron, and a few other barristers had distin- guished themselves in the Catholic Association, but since Emancipation they had all gradually withdrawn from O'Connell, and allied themselves with the Whig party. Among his political associates in 1840 there were a few men who had been called to the bar, and HOW TEE REPEAL MOVEMENT BEGAN. 15 one or two who were practising barristers in a quite insignificant way, but the Four Courts were no better represented than the gentry or merchants. It would not be just to assume that the old associates who had fallen away from O'Connell were all unfaithful to Irish interests. Very often indeed they were so, or became so in the end ; but he had sometimes made it difficult for men of honour and spirit to remain his associates. He was impatient of counsellors who guarded their personal independence too jealously, and prone to the fault common among the strong and self-confident, of preferring agents to confederates. This was the state of feeling among the people to whom O'Connell directly addressed himself. In Eng- land the feeling was widely different. From the period when he first became dangerous as a Catholic Leader he had been systematically abused by the anti-Catholic Press ; but since the Irish members under his control became supporters, of the Whig administration, party spirit had come to augment sectarian prejudice, and every public proceeding in which he was engaged was shamefully misrepresented. The O'Connell of English opinion at this time was a portrait as distorted in its lineaments, and as smirched with the stains of slander and prejudice, as the Oliver Cromwell of the Eestoration wits, or the George Washington of English journalism during the War of Independence. He had given sub- stantial help to more than one party formed for the redress of wrongs in England or the Colonies, and was an acknowledged leader among the parliamentary 16 TOUNG IRELAND. Radicals, but these public services were forgotten when he alarmed the national pride of Englishmen. No time or place indeed was deemed unsuitable for disparag- ing him ; Lever writing a story of Ireland before the Union, Lockhart writing a biography of Scott, or Thackeray a book of Eastern Travel contrived to gratify the taste that revelled in jibes at O'Connell. The newspapers had recourse to ruder missiles ; his politics according to these liberal critics, were simply a device to obtain money, and to delude an ignorant and excit- able people with false promises that he might obtain it regularly and plentifully. The allusion was to an annual offering known as the O'Connell tribute. This fund originated immediately after Catholic Emancipa- tion in a desire to reward its most successful advocate and place him in a position to devote himself exclu- sively to Irish affairs. The first collection fell short of the necessary amount for this purpose, and it was deter- mined to make the appeal periodical, and turn the tribute into an annuity. The fund was under the control of a skilful diplomate who was paid by a per- centage of the receipts, and it had been managed with great success.* Every year the most competent writer who could be induced to undertake the task, made an appeal to the country on the merits and services of O'Connell ; meetings were held in the Dublin parishes to set an example of liberality, and on a day fixed a * Patrick Vincent Fitz Patrick, a man of wit and a charming story- teller, who delighted Dublin dinner-parties, and was never seen at a political meeting.] HOW THE REPEAL MOVEMENT BEGAN. 17 collection was made in nearly every Catholic church and chapel in the island. At first all was spontaneous alacrity and zeal, but the tribute had now been nearly a decade in operation, and by this time private solicita- tion and public emulation were necessary to keep the stream flowing. O'Connell had undoubtedly given up the practice of a profession which yielded him a liberal income, to watch over the interests of Ireland, and rather than abandon that duty he had refused the office of Master of the Rolls proffered him by the Melbourne administration. But men who would have honoured him if the annuity were paid quarterly at the Treasury, reviled him because it was a free-will offering collected from the people, without the intervention of the tax- gatherer. No doubt among his warmest supporters there were not a few who would have preferred a tribune who like Brutus and Washington served the people without pay or perquisites ; and his power of useful- ness would have .been immensely increased had he added self-sacrifice to his other great qualities. But on the whole there was a disposition in Ireland to take a generous view of the case, to make allowance for a man long accustomed to dispense money freely, and to give the national leader the benefit of that sentiment of Edmund Burke, that " he who takes a fee for plead- ing the cause of distress against power and man- fully performs the duty he has assumed, receives an honorable recompense for a virtuous service." In England however where Pitt and Fox had been helped by contributions from their partizans, and where Cob- c 18 YOUNG IRELAND. den and Bright were soon to be so helped, it was treated as manifest prostitution, and he was habitually stig- matized as " a paid patriot" and a " Big Beggarman."' The new agitation was pronounced by the leading journals to be a device primarily for filling his pockets, and collaterally for embarrassing a party which dis- dained his assistance. Peace and prosperity they affirmed would bless Ireland if only the tribute was abandoned ; but a hired agitator was as necessarily opposed to peace as a soldier of fortune. They pointed scornfulty to the fact that there was an O'Connell Bank where he was Governor, and an O'Connell Brewery to which his youngest son lent his name, as evidence that he traded on his popularity. And they clamoured for a truce to public agitation as the one thing needful ; such a truce at that time being another name for leaving scan- dalous abuses unexposed and unredressed. England doubtless believed him to be a sordid impostor, for it is a weakness of England to believe evil willingly of men whom she dislikes or fears. Here and there a public writer was courageous enough to suggest that this hypothesis was founded on an impossible theory of his life. From early manhood he had been constantly true to what he believed to be the interest of his country. For twenty years he led an agitation for religious liberty till the Government of the Empire capitulated to the committee of the Catholic Association. He * The phrases were invented in Ireland by a Whig journalist in the secret service and pay of the Government, but were immediately adopted aiid naturalized in England. HOW THE REPEAL MOVEMENT BEGAN. 19 strode to a foremost place in a hostile House of Com- mons, and in the end set up and pulled down adminis- trations according as they were friendly or unfriendly to Ireland ; was it not reasonably probable so they suggested that he might be, not an impostor, but simply an intense Irishman, who shared the mistaken aims and unruly passions of his race ? But this plea in abatement was drowned in a general chorus of reprobation ; he was troublesome to England and there- fore plainly a scoundrel. The means by which these impediments were all gradually overcome, the Irish people united in a pas- sionate desire for the revival of the Irish Constitution, the proposal which was received in the first instance with jeers in the Chamber of Commerce of Dublin, made a subject of popular enthusiasm in Paris, New York, and Vienna, and the English people taught that what they had to encounter was not the devices of a dema- gogue but the will of a nation, are worthy of being carefully studied. The main factor was the prodigious energy of O'Connell. He was gifted with the patient inflexible will before which difficulties disappear, am} with the belief in himself, which comes of contests won. After all that could be alleged by detractors there remained the abnormal fact that in the eyes of the world he was the embodied voice and spirit of his country ; and on the narrow stage of a provincial capital he had raised himself in her name to be a European potentate, and to stand on a level with rulers and kings. c 2 YOUNG IRELAND. The odds were doubtless formidable, but when he first became a Catholic leader he had faced odds still more disproportionate. He has been compared, in that period, not inaptly, to a Christian captive in the Coloseum, who saw, wherever his eyes were turned, the robes of authority and the arms of power, tier above tier, arrayed against him. But all that huge edifice of Pro- testant ascendancy, like the Flavian amphitheatre, had fallen into ruins ; and fallen before assaults of which his own were not the least memorable. The organiza- tion he had framed for this purpose had been servilely copied to carry Parliamentary Reform in England, and had essentially contributed to carry it ; and he might well believe that it was good for another achievement in the hands of its inventor. Though the party which adhered to him was diminished in numbers, and more dangerously crippled by the desertion of its staff officers, he could at least count on it for unswerving obedience. Within its ranks he had long been a master as supreme as Calvin in Geneva, almost as supreme as Francia in Paraguay. In the last resource he was the sole embodi- ment of the popular confidence. In former agitations whenever he had reason to distrust the fidelity of a colleague, or to fear his rivalry too acutely, he cashiered him without mercy, and the people invariably acquiesced. If a journal of his party offended him it was promptly punished by public censure, and if it did not make its peace by submission, generally died under his displea- sure, or was driven to support itself by a disgraceful alliance with the Castle. Even bishops commonly HOW THE REPEAL MOVEMENT BEGAN. 21 regarded by the people with a veneration which pre- cluded criticism, lost their prestige if they fell under the habitual censure of the Corn Exchange. Whoever is familiar with the controversies of that period must admit that though he committed many errors and some grave injustice, he was in general in the right and his opponents in the wrong. The infatuation of the Irish people in maintaining their confidence in him almost unimpaired, through all changes of policy has been made the subject of much vindictive rhetoric.* But it is difficult to suggest what better they could have done. They were slowly emerging from ignorance and incapa- city deliberately created by law, they had not leisure or the requisite knowledge of facts to discriminate the right and wrong of individual controversies, but they knew they had got a great tribune, who had delivered them from the servitude of ages, who was flesh of their flesh and bone of their bone, who loved what they loved, and hated what they hated, and whom they must accept as nature and circumstances had moulded him, or not at all ; and they did, by instinct, what the most disci- plined of the ancient or mediaeval democracies would have done on policy and calculation, they conferred a dictatorship upon him and maintained him in it with unwavering fidelity. But arbitrary power bestowed by a community upon a conspicuous citizen is a gift which is apt to be fatal to one or other of the contract- ing parties ; it may be wise to grant it in extreme * Lord Brougham's " Statesmen of the Time of George III." The Tory Press of 1842-3, passim. 22 YOUNG IRELAND. cases, but it can scarcely ever be accepted with impunity. The long- enjoyment of supreme authority had un- doubtedly made O'Connell unscrupulous in the exercise of it. In private life he was considerate of differences, and placable, but in public controversy when he was contending for his opinions, or his will, coram populo, he seldom hesitated to win an immediate victory at any cost to his opponent's reputation, or his own. He had undertaken to think for the whole nation, and those to whom thinking for themselves was a necessity found it a hard experiment to act with him. He dealt with dif- ference of opinion as long as it made no serious show of resistance with a certain humorous forbearance, free from malignity, but if it became dangerous he broke into a cold scornful rage which was likened to the boiling surge of a northern sea. This was a habit highly unfavourable to the growth of individual capacity. Obedience was a virtue which covered many shortcomings in his eyes, and as there is no virtue easier to simulate, it had often a very awkward collection of shortcomings to cover. A great master in any career ordinarily founds a school of students qualified and proud to carry out his designs ; he is certain to do so if he has been helpful and considerate with young men ; but at this time O'Connell was without one associate possessing ac- knowledged weight of character or solidity of judg- ment, or enthusiasm of conviction. Of his ordinary political retinue some were painfully deficient in capacity and education, and others whom he had raised to parliament were reputed to have turned their public HOW THE REPEAL MOVEMENT BEGAN. 23 functions to the basest uses. For this is the inevitable penalty of the statesman or leader who prefers courtiers and lackeys to counsellors and peers. Marvellous as were O'Connell's energy and resources, they were not sufficient to move the mass of prejudice and dumb indifference which confronted him; and they would have failed to move it in the end, without the help of agencies which hitherto he had never employed, and hardly understood. Of the nation which he proposed to unite in a common purpose, the socially better class would scarcely give his proposal a patient hearing. The bulk of the people, upon whom alone he could count, were gifted with a generosity which shrank before no sacrifice ; but they were ill-equipped for such an enterprise. Their courage was not for- tified by knowledge or by that pride of race which feeds the self-respect of nations. They had been de- prived by deliberate design not only of all liberal culture, but of the very instrumental parts of educa- tion. The industrial classes were unable to pay school fees out of wages often too small to buy daily meals of potatoes and salt, and in this class the Catholics were twenty to one. The public schools provided for them by the State, between the Union and the Eeformed Parliament, were schools where the Protestant catechism, expounded by a Protestant schoolmaster, and interpolated with lectures on the errors of Popery, was part of the daily discipline. To attend these schools was naturally considered in- famous by the class for whom they were designed. 24 YOUNG IRELAND. The Catholic schools established by private enterprise were such as may be imagined among a people who had lost their lands, and their churches, their convents and their colleges, who were long prohibited from buying or inheriting freeholds, or practising the liberal professions, who were restricted in their commercial pursuits, and were slowly recovering from a vigilant and subtle perse- cution of which these were but the vulgar evidences. They were necessarily schools without adequate books or teachers or system or discipline. The generation which had grown up under O'Connell had got a political training which in some degree compensated for their want of culture and knowledge. In the Catholic struggle they learned concert, self-reliance, the necessity of making mutual concessions, and the invaluable secret to a suffering people, the secret of their own power. But they had been taught for the most part as men were taught before the invention of printing. When the Catholic Association began to address Ireland newspapers were dear and scarce, and never penetrated lower than the middle class. The day's wages of a labouring man would barely buy a single copy. Such as existed on the popular side at that time contained little beyond the speeches and letters of O'Connell and Sheil, and faint echoes of them sent back from provincial meetings. The majority of the Celtic race could not read or write ; and the minority who could read and write possessed, as we shall presently see, scarce one of the intellectual agencies which in free countries HOW TEE REPEAL MOVEMENT BEGAN. 25 help to elevate and consolidate national opinion and make it a powerful weapon. That with such aid, and under such conditions it was possible to raise the question of repealing the union into the region of practical politics the region where a public controversy excites lively hopes and fears, and arrays supporters and adversaries in uncertain conflict, might well seem improbable. NOTE ON CHAPTER I. , SHABMAN CRAWFORD AND FATHER DAVERN. O'Connell's reception of Sharman Crawford at the Dublin meeting was so unfriendly as to have prevented co-operation between them after- wards when co-operation would have produced important public results. When Crawford was addressing himself in a somewhat hard and formal manner to the question whether the substitution of rent-charge for tithe ought to have been accepted on behalf of Ireland, O'Connell kept inter- posing grotesque questions such as " What brought you here, Sharman, my jewel ? " " What are you after, Crawford,my man ? " and bantering comments on his white waistcoat. We shall have occasion to see how bitterly this some- what clumsy pleasantry was afterwards resented. A single specimen will sufficiently indicate the character and spirit of Father Davern's letters. " On the tithe question the people of Ireland had already chosen their own remedy they wanted no legislation sought for no interference they were prepared to suffer all, to endure all, but to pay nothing. A clear stage and no favour between them and the parson was all they looked for ; they had it if they were let alone, and they were on the very brink of complete success if the blight of Whig legislation and internal delusions had not fallen upon their councils The Bill was again and again and a third time thrown out, until at length, when the country became weary of the vain contention, the appropriation clause against which the Lords objected, but which was the only part of the measure that tempted or de- luded the people to tolerate it at all was unceremoniously excluded. Yes, Sir, Lord J. Russell your immaculate and justice- loving Lord John ven- tured to turn into the House a naked Bill of securities, including payment of arrears to the Protestant clergy which gave them a charge on the first estate, and made the landlords their proctors, at a time when seven millions of people are crying out for abolition which perpetuated the mockery of churches without congregations and endowments without services, amidst a people so poor that the winds and the rains of winter visited them as they knelt crowded in their lowly houses of worship which was equally de- structive to the interests of landlord and tenant, rendering the one liable to have a receiver placed over his property within thirty days after the tithe falls 26 YOUNG IRELAND. due, and the other to distress and ejectment if he did not enable him to pay, which finally made complaint vain and resistance almost impossible. This Bill, Sir, ' worse than ever was imposed by Mahomedan sword on Grecian vassals,' passed through both houses of Parliament and was sup- ported by Daniel O'Counell and a great majority of the liberal Irish repre- sentatives Oh. Sir, reflect for one moment ! Was it for the discharge of arrears which never could be recovered, or for a reduction of twenty- five per cent., our ancestors resisted this unhallowed tax through sufferings and danger, or that the widow at Rathcormac sold the blood of her son ? " (Letter of Rev. P. 0. S. Davern to Daniel O'Connell, Esq., M.P.) The movement against tithe began late in 1830. In 1831 a dozen men were shot and a score wounded by the police at Newtown Barry. Next year eleven policemen were killed by the people at Carrackshock. In 1833 Church rates and the ten bishoprics were abolished. In 1834 a new massacre of the people took place at Rathcormac. In 1838 the Act con- verting tithe into rent-charge became law. CHAPTEE II. HOW THE MOVEMENT FARED IN THE BEGINNING, AND WHAT O'CONNELL TAUGHT. O'CoNNELL opened his Association on Burgh Quay and addressed himself week after week to an humble and scanty audience, with unfailing punctuality. The audience he hoped to win was not collected on the Coal Quays but scattered through the presbyteries workshops and farmhouses of the island ; and in his singular career there is nothing more notable than the patience with which this man who had long passed his grand climacteric, applied himself to the task, as if he had a life-time to work it out. The few recruits fit for political service who presented themselves were turned to good account. A series of reports on separate branches of the national question was published, from time to time, bearing the name of O'Connell on the title-page, and no doubt projected by him, but like Mirabeau's speeches, often the work of industrious journeymen. They were weighty with facts, but facts ill digested and clumsily applied, and which only struck the public ear when they reappeared, as the more significant ones were sure to do, in his speeches. A native Parliament such was his thesis 28 YOUNG IRELAND. had become manifestly necessary because the imperial system had failed to answer any of the higher purposes of Government. It had not brought Ireland pros- perity, it had not even secured for her honest treatment in the transactions arising out of the national part- nership. Trade and Commerce which were prosperous in 1800 were now ruined. Ireland was growing annually poorer till she had reached a lower level than any country in Europe, and yet she was loaded with an inordinate proportion of the public debt. Parliamentary promises of relief had been ostenta- tiously made and cynically broken ; and notwithstand- ing the Union upon paper there was still in practice one law for England and another and quite different law for " that part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland called Ireland." Some summary of the facts O'Connell relied on can scarcely be dispensed with by readers who would understand the transac- tions which followed. It may serve moreover to allay a doubt which has long perplexed English writers, whether Ireland, once Catholic Emancipation was granted, ought not to have acknowledged thankfully that the Promised Land was reached, and refrained from agitation ever after. There is no case so trite and unimpressive, as a case which no one disputes, and this was O'Connell's first difficulty. To tell Ireland that she had suffered by the Union was like telling Bruges or Venice that her glory has departed. Every one who listened to him knew that the ancient seat of industry in the Liberties was HOW THE MOVEMENT FARED. 29 now a pauper-warren, that the stately edifices erected by an Irish Parliament for the necessities of interna- tional commerce, were the offices of tax-gatherers, that the palaces of the resident nobility had become museums and mendicities, and the Woollen Hall from which the produce of five thousand looms was once circulated, a Poor House crowded with weavers with- out work ; and every one who read his speeches could probably cite some local experience of the same cha- racter. But the trained politician knew how to draw from the familiar facts the fundamental principles which underlay them. In a partnership there are certain essential conditions ; conditions which cannot be dis- puted : there ought to be mutual benefit : the business ought to be conducted fairly : and all en- gagements ought to be strictly carried out; otherwise the partnership must cease. But were there mutual advantages in the partnership between England and Ireland? His illustrations of this point, after they have passed under a sort of hydraulic pressure, ma}' still be read with much profit. The Union was a profitable compact for one of the parties. England found a market for her fabrics, a recruiting field for her army, a partner in her public burthens, and by making absenteeism a necessity among the wealthy classes who were members of the Houses of Parliament, and the train who fol- lowed them, she drew from Ireland an annual tribute of five or six millions of rent. She enjoyed a monopoly of the public patronage, the chief offices paid by Irish taxes were filled by English functionaries. But for the other partner it was a dis- astrous compact. Before the Union Ireland was the seat of 32 YOUNG IRELAND. justice ran uniformly through the whole scheme. Scotland by the Reform Act got an increase of members in the ratio of one to five of her existing representatives, Wales got one to six, Ireland only one to twenty. The voters to whom the selection of representatives belonged were restricted in a manner equally unfair. The. Isle of Anglesea, with a population little over 30,000, had more registered electors than Protestant Tyrone or Catholic Mayo, with more than ten times as many inhabitants. Westmoreland, with less than one-fourteenth part of the population of the county of Cork, had actually more electors, and that is to say more political power, than the great Irish county. These results were brought about by laws which were in force in Ireland and not in force in England, and which were continued precisely because they inflicted injustice. Was this a rash statement ? Let men mark an example and illus- tration of the proposition. There were a number of taxes to pay in Ireland first before electors could register ; and again before they could vote. In Dublin it was alleged that the collectors of some of the local taxes kept out of the way of receiving them in order to disfranchise certain electors; to meet this device a clause was introduced into a Bill of unex- ampled fairness and simplicity; it enabled the ratepayer to deposit the amount of his taxes in the Bank of Ireland to the credit of the collector ; but the House of Lords struck out this provision because it would facilitate the registration of electors in Dublin. Suppose it were London or Edinburgh would this have been possible ? In England more than one-fifth of the male population possessed the franchise ; in Ireland only one- twentieth. Was there not manifestly one law for England and another for Ireland. There were, it must be confessed, many Irishmen who insisted that justice might be obtained from the English Parliament, but they were persons with short memories. What had happened only six years before? In 1834 the House of Commons by a signal majority refused to consider the Repeal question; but accompanied this refusal by a pledge to "apply their best HOW THE MOVEMENT FARED. 33 attention to the removal of all just causes of complaint, and to the promotion of all well-considered measures of improvement for the benefit of Ireland." This resolution was communicated to the Lords, who concurred in it, and joined in an address to the King- reiterating the pledge. How had this pledge been ful- filled? The Irish Corporations were exclusively in the hands of Protestants ; the bulk of the nation had no more share in them than in the Corporations of London or Amsterdam. They were reeking with corruption ; a royal commission reported that in every instance they had plundered the public estate granted for their endowment, yet these dishonest Corporations were main- tained in full authority, although in England and Scotland a thorough municipal reform had been effected. "England'' exclaimed O'Connell, who understood the effect of iteration in catching the popular ear " England has for several years en- joyed reformed Corporations ; Scotland has for several years enjoyed reformed Corporations ; but Ireland, where in lieu of a native Parliament all just causes of complaint were to be promptly removed, is contemptuously refused corporate reform/' The supreme test of any law is whether it promotes the happiness of the people. The Union had ruined merchants, traders, and artisans; and the peasantry fared no better than the skilled workman. ' The Poor Law Commissioners computed the number of agricultural labourers to be over a million, and ascertained that one-half of these were out of employment for thirty weeks in the year. "A fact" (says Thomas Carlyle afterward*) "perhaps the most eloquent that ever was written down in any language at any date of the world's history." These men with half employment had depending on their labour for daily bread more than a million and a half of women, children, and other helpless persons. The Poor Law reports describe their methods of obtaining sustenance in terms that seemed borrowed from the horrors of some mediaeval siege. In Galway during the summer the peasantry lived on cab- bage and green herbs with a few potatoes. In some parts of * " Chartism," by Thomas Carlyle. D 32 YOUNG IRELAND. justice ran uniformly through the whole scheme. Scotland by the Reform Act got an increase of members in the ratio of one to five of her existing representatives, Wales got one to six, Ireland only one to twenty. The voters to whom the selection of representatives belonged were restricted in a manner equally unfair. The. Isle of Anglesea, with a population little over 30,000, had more registered electors than Protestant Tyrone or Catholic Mayo, with more than ten times as many inhabitants. Westmoreland, with less than one-fourteenth part of the population of the county of Cork, had actually more electors, and that is to say more political power, than the great Irish county. These results were brought about by laws which were in force in Ireland and not in force in England, and which were continued precisely because they inflicted injustice. Was this a rash statement ? Let men mark an example and illus- tration of the proposition. There were a number of taxes to pay in Ireland first before electors could register ; and again before they could vote. In Dublin it was alleged that the collectors of some of the local taxes kept out of the way of receiving them in order to disfranchise certain electors; to meet this device a clause was introduced into a Bill of unex- ampled fairness and simplicity; it enabled the ratepayer to deposit the amount of his taxes in the Bank of Ireland to the credit of the collector ; but the House of Lords struck out this provision because it would facilitate the registration of electors in Dublin. Suppose it were London or Edinburgh would this have been possible ? In England more than one-fifth of the male population possessed the franchise ; in Ireland only one- twentieth. Was there not manifestly one law for England and another for Ireland. There were, it must be confessed, many Irishmen who insisted that justice might be obtained from the English Parliament, but they were persons with short memories. What had happened only six years before ? In 1834 the House of Commons by a signal majority refused to consider the Repeal question; but accompanied this refusal by a pledge to "apply their best HOW THE MOVEMENT FARED. 33 attention to the removal of all just causes of complaint, and to the promotion of all well-considered measures of improvement for the benefit of Ireland." This resolution was communicated to the Lords, who concurred in it, and joined in an address to the King- reiterating the pledge. How had this pledge been ful- filled? The Irish Corporations were exclusively in the hands of Protestants ; the bulk of the nation had no more share in them than in the Corporations of London or Amsterdam. They were reeking with corruption ; a royal commission reported that in every instance they had plundered the public estate granted for their endowment, yet these dishonest Corporations were main- tained in full authority, although in England and Scotland a thorough municipal reform had been effected. "England" exclaimed O'Connell, who understood the effect of iteration in catching- the popular ear " England has for several years en- joyed reformed Corporations; Scotland has for several years enjoyed reformed Corporations ; but Ireland, where in lieu of a native Parliament all just causes of complaint were to be promptly removed, is contemptuously refused corporate reform." The supreme test of any law is whether it promotes the happiness of the people. The Union had ruined merchants, traders, and artisans; and the peasantry fared no better than the skilled workman. The Poor Law Commissioners computed the number of agricultural labourers to be over a million, and ascertained that one-half of these were out of employment for thirty weeks in the year. "A fact" (says Thomas Carlyle afterward*) '/perhaps the most eloquent that ever was written down in any language at any date of the world's history." These men with half employment had depending on their labour for daily bread more than a million and a half of women, children, and other helpless persons. The Poor Law reports describe their methods of obtaining sustenance in terms that seemed borrowed from the horrors of some medieval siege. In Galway during the summer the peasantry lived on cab- bage and green herbs with a few potatoes. In some parts of * " Chartiam," by Thomas Carlyle. D 34 YOUXG IKE LAND. the county Mayo when the potatoes were exhausted " they bled their cattle and ate the boiled blood ; sometimes mixed with meal, but often without it/' This was in Connaught, where the distress was greatest ; in Munster destitution was not so com- mon as in Connaught, but it was more common than in any other part of the civilised world. Here were facts of weight and significance ; and O'Connell was gifted beyond most men with the power of employing them effectively. Yet the movement made no visible progress. His facts were not disputed, and even Unionists of liberal disposition, were ready to admit that though it might be necessary to retain Ireland in the partnership, with or without her consent, it ought not to be necessary to cheat her in the partner- ship accounts ; but the proposed remedy did not gain adherents. The audience in the Corn Exchange continued to be scanty. The periodical meetings of a political body where the business was to receive subscriptions, and the debate was in effect a monologue, were necessarily monotonous. And Dublin had been familiar for more than twenty years with a periodical meeting on Burgh Quay. For strangers the presence of O'Connell was always an attraction ; but his great powers were now rarely employed. His speech was commonly a review of the miscellaneous proceedings in Parliament and elsewhere, full of practical sense indeed, sometimes relieved by happy touches of humour, but often tame and even tedious. On special occasions, when some new wrong was to be denounced, when a public right had HOW THE MOVEMENT FARED. 3a been called in question, and needed to be vindicated, or when he was unfairly assailed by an opponent worthy of an answer, the born orator awoke. The mobile face, gleaming with humour or blazing in wrath, the well set head, and iron jaw, the towering figure, and voice of leonine compass, but capable of all modulations in the gamut of passion or persuasion, furnished a picture never to be forgotten. His tones were melody; and the gift is not a common one among orators reared among the uncertain winters of the West. Grattan's voice was weak and artificial, Curran never quite over- catne the natural impediment which fixed on the boy the nickname of " stuttering Jack," Shiel's falsetto was likened to the noise of a rusty saw, and in later times Meagher's tones were passionate and thrilling but never rich or flexible. But the music of O'Connell's voice associated itself with every mood of his mind as if it were created for that special purpose alone. His best mood was close vigorous logic and scathing indignation. He sometimes uttered short fierce sentences of concen- trated passion which fell on the popular ear like a tocsin; but he was no longer often in his best mood. He insisted it was necessary to repeat the same ideas and even the same catch words again and again with a total disregard of the immediate effect on the fresh- ness or symmetry of his speech, in order to plant them in the public mind. On some notable success he had announced the date of the event as " a great day for Ireland," but the phrase was repeated so often on smaller occasions that great days became too numerous D 2 36 YOUNG TEE LAND. for the most patriotic calendar ; and he had a set speech ready for occasions when there was nothing particular to be said, describing the natural resources and pic- turesque scenery of Ireland, the hundredth repetition of which was a trial to human patience.* For more than a year there came no decisive answer to his appeals. The association met week by week in the old historic hall, but it was regarded without hope, and with but limited confidence in the country ; and the Eepeal Rent, a contribution which was the pulse of popular sympathy for O'Connell, as the funds are the pulse of public confidence in the State, was miserably low. The amount contributed during the year scarcely exceeded the sum received in a single week at a later period. In the face of these discouragements he steadily pursued his task, and more than fifty times took up the theme anew. He described the shameful methods by which the Union had been carried ; the opposition with * To hear O'Connell in his ordinary mood was to run the risk of entirely misunderstanding and underrating his powers. Count Montalem- bert, who had conceived a lively enthusiasm for the Irish leader and his mission, came upon him in this undress and jumped to the most mistaken conclusions. In a private letter to a friend depicting a repeal meeting which he attended he says : " It would be impossible for me to describe to you the enthusiasm with which he was received and applauded, an enthusiasm in which I should have much wished to join, but with which his eloquence totally failed to inspire me. Indeed I must confess that in this respect he strangely disappointed me ; he is only a demagogue, he is 110 such thing as a great orator. He is windy and declamatory, his argu- ments have no conviction, his imagination has no charm, no freshness ; his style is h;irsh, abrupt, and incoherent; the more I see of him, the more I listen to him. the more strong I am confirmed in my first opinion, that he is not stamped with the seal of genius, or of true greatness. But he defends the worthiest of causes ; he has neither a formidable adversary nor a formidable rival ; he has a magnificent part to play, and circum- stances will stand to him as they have done to so many others, in the place of genius." Mrs. Oiiphant's " L-fe of Mcntalembert," HOW THE MOVEMENT FARED. 37 which it was encountered by the best men in Ireland, and the subsequent calamities which had justified their resistance, and finally he proceeded to develop to his scanty audience a scheme for the reconstruction of the Irish Parliament on the basis of the present population. But the people continued apathetic, and the middle class stood aside, and in private made a jest of his reconstructed parliament. His facts were not contested but they were already familiar to his audience and they created no fermentation. They were facts eminently fit to be employed in a parliamentary contest, but except those painting the condition of the indus- trious people which familiarity had robbed of half their horror, scarce facts fit to raise a nation to the height of patriotic passion by which revolutions are accomplished. It is not in defence of their material interests, still less to adjust an account of profit and loss, that a people make supreme efforts. The gifts which enabled O'Connell to face these disheartening impediments were the gifts to which all the success of his past career was attributable. He joined steadfast industry to a capacity with which it is seldom united except in intellects of the first order, the capacity for projecting. He could plan large designs boldly and work out the details of his plan as if he possessed no other faculty but diligence. He had boundless self-reliance. When he began to take a part in Catholic affairs more than a generation earlier he exhibited an intrepidity which at that time seemed prodigious in one of his class and race. A 38 YOUXG IRELAND. barrister practising in Courts which were at once hostile and practically irresponsible, and one of the earliest Catholics since the fall of Limerick who had entered them in that character, he comported himself as if the agents of Protestant Ascendancy were not his born masters. It is probable that his foreign education contributed as much as his native vigour to create this civic courage. He had lived in countries where men of his creed were the rulers, and he did not consider the religion of the State a diploma of rank ; he had witnessed gorgeous ceremonials, and he no longer regarded with inordinate awe the mere trappings of power. Nothing perhaps established his authority among the Catholics in the early days so much as this demeanour. Little more than a quarter of a century earlier a Catholic priest grossly outraged by a Protestant peer could find ' no barrister bold enough to hold a brief in his behalf, except a still obscure and briefless junior named Philpot Curran. It was not strange that the subject race looked up with wonder and veneration to an advocate of their Own blood who stood like a visible providence between them and their oppressors. For the first time in living memory they began to believe that there was a law to which they could have recourse against injustice, and which within certain limits would protect them. It was a great service to the State to create such a belief, but it was not the most beneficial result of his courage. To see the young Catholic lawyer not only hold his own fearlessly with the Bench, but subject officials to a sharp censorship, to see him ready to defend HOW THE MOVEMENT FARED. 39 the weak and poor, and always hopeful and confident of final success for a just cause, were important examples to a people struggling back into the atmosphere of liberty ; and in old age the consciousness of having done this work was still an inspiration. He was patient because a long experience of life taught him how difficulties disappear and opinions alter, and he was of so vigorous a constitution that no labour disheartened him. He was always at his post and as ready for work as for a feast. He lived his life indeed in public, the parliamentary recess being occupied with meetings and 'dinners of charitable societies, relieved only by a month or two with his beagles at Darrynane. He was not easily ruffled and not easily bored, and his very de- ficiencies rendered him in some respects fitter for his work. The robust practical man found tolerable a life wholly wanting in the privacy and seclusion without which a man of speculative genius could no more have existed than witho.ut food or air. He possessed in an eminent degree an art indispensable in his position, the art of conciliation. In society and in the transaction of business his manners were cheerful and engaging; and notwithstanding his long enjoyment of supreme power he was tolerant of difference of opinion in council or in private, when it was not offensively maintained. His person and countenance were still well suited to enforce his will. They expressed authority and a certain massive dignity. His career as a Nisi Prius lawyer however, rather than his career as a patriot moulded the lilies of his face, in which vigilance and 40 YOUNG IRELAND. acuteness were the prevailing expression. And first and last his most notable successes were those which only a lawyer could have won. During the long Catholic struggle he was known to the people as " the Coun- sellor " as Swift had been known as " the Dean " and as Wellington was known as " the Duke." After Emancipation and even before the victory was sanc- tioned by law, a practice began of speaking of him as the Liberator, but it never took root in the popular speech like the early and significant title, which implied not merely one learned in the law, but the man upon whose counsel the poor and oppressed might rely. It is curious that the first relaxation of the penal laws against Irish Catholics, which came of the panic created in Europe by the French Revolution, should have de- termined the career of the man who was destined to give them the final stroke. " The son of a gentleman farmer " (to use his own language) living in a wild and primitive district where English authority was held in slight reverence, there was no choice for a vigorous young Catholic, full of impatient strength, between entering the army of some Continental state and de- generating into an adventurous smuggler, or perhaps an outlaw leader in his native mountains. But when he was barely on the threshold of manhood the bar was opened to Catholics and he entered on a career in which he was destined to win a splendid success. He was a pure Celt, but his life had been distinguished by qualities which their detractors deny to the Celt- patience, steadfastness of purpose, and complete mastery HOW THE MOVEMENT FARED. 41 of his feelings. He was perhaps rash by tempera- ment, but he was certainly prudent by discipline. His contest with a cruel faction armed with all the resources of power, had taught him caution, and even cunning, for it is the common weapon of the oppressed. These legitimate resources of a powerful and dis- ciplined intellect he sometimes supplemented by agencies which he might better have left to the feeble. He nattered his adherents in mass and in detail, and often with a grossness which savoured of secret contempt. Public thanks the just reward of public services, were distributed indiscriminately and had a tendency to degenerate into what in Ireland is called "blarney." There was a story, caricatured of course but substantially true, of O'Connell proposing a country gentleman to be a member of one of his Associations in terms like these. " I have the distinguished honour and satisfaction of moving that we enroll among our members my esteemed friend the worthy, and patriotic Mr., (sotto voce to the secretary, What's his name, E-ay ?) Among the imitators of O'Connell this practice ran of course to seed. In the Association proceedings at this time there is a " Travelling Report " of one of its officers commencing in these terms " On Tuesday last I proceeded to according to arrangement. I waited on our esteemed friend Mr. by whom I was introduced to that most excellent patriot and venerated dignitary the Very Reverend - ; upon consultation however finding the public mind involved in the deepest sorrow by the death of that truly illustrious Irishman &c." The 42 YOUNG IRELAND. last-mentioned person however happened to be one who had a genuine claim to distinction. After the Association had been a year in existence the Whigs, who had lost control of the House of Commons, appealed to the constituencies by a dissolu- tion.* The measure of O'Connell's success was now brought to a practical test, and the result was a pro- found and complete failure. Nine years before, the popular constituencies had elected forty Eepealers, and set aside peremptorily the most distinguished Whigs who refused the national pledge. Now among the new members there was not a single recruit to the national party. A few of the existing members professed them- selves Eepealers, but the number fell short of a dozen. And this small group included four members of his own family, his colleague in the county Cork and Messrs. Dillon Browne and Somers, who had already brought reproach on the name of Irish member, and who it may be feared would have professed themselves Mormons rather than be excluded from Bellamy's and the smoking room of the House of Commons. His youngest son was defeated in Carlow, the county which had accepted a London tradesman at his hands a few years before. The boroughs most susceptible of popular control were relinquished without a contest to the Whigs. Clonmel elected the Irish Attorney General, Dungarvan the Judge Advocate General, Drogheda a Chief Secretary in petto, and Dundalk his future Under Secretary. The county of Kildare continued its support to Mr. More * The dissolution took place oil the 23rd of June, 1841. HOW THE MOVEMENT FARED. 43 O'Farrell, a Catholic squire who was Secretary of the Treasury. O'Connell himself lost his seat for Dublin. Dublin was hard to win, the Irish Eeform Act having left the roll of electors crowded with pauper "freemen" created by the exclusive Corporation, and loaded the freeholders with an unfair burthen of taxes, but when- ever the popular passion rose high these difficulties were overcome ; on this occasion they were not overcome. To exclude him from Parliament was impossible ; two counties immediately elected him ; but the significant fact of his defeat in Dublin remained. The city which had the greatest interest in the proposed change such was the exulting language of his enemies after more than fifty meetings had been held in its midst, refused to sanction his scheme.* * In England at' this time critics were agreed that the distress in Ireland however serious could not be helped by agitation ; on the contrary the first step to improvement was to close up the Repeal Association, and renounce agitation once for all. The sincerity, or at any rate the wisdom, of this counsel was brought to a sharp test a little later when commercial depression fell upon England, and the shrewd manufacturers of the north betook themselves for a remedy to the formation of the Anti-Corn Law League and the practice of the identical methods which were proiiounced to be an aggravation of the disease in Ireland. In a country where there were a thousand wrongs to redress, no redress has ever come, except after long and vehement complaint. An Irish priest once asked a milk- man, who admitted that he filled his pail occasionally from the pump, " How do you know, Michael, when to stop watering " " Begorra, your reverence, we go on watering till the customers cry out agin it." This story supplies the rationale and justification of political agitation in Ireland. Parliaments and governments go on blundering till the people cry out vigorously against it. The country indeed wanted repose as these critics suggested, and still wants it ; but not the repose of sullen despair, but the repose of security and comfort. CHAPTER III. ITS FIRST NOTABLE RECRUITS. AT the period of its greatest depression Bepeal ob- tained its first important recruits. Their value was not of that sort which impresses the vulgar imagi- nation ; they were not men of rank or fortune or of historic name, which in Ireland sometimes counts for more than rank or fortune. But they brought to the organization an element without which, notwith- standing the prodigious vigour and resources of its founder, it would surely have perished. Half a dozen young men, mostly barristers or law students, and half of them Protestants, silently joined the Association. The barristers, only recently called, had no professional stand- ing or business, but they were young, full of hope, of unstained reputation and manifestly disinterested, for they were cutting themselves off from the source of favour and promotion. For a time they took little part in the weekly meetings ; but they worked on com- mittees, and began to speak to the people in unaccus- tomed tones in its official correspondence and through the press. Nobody outside a narrow circle had ever heard their names ; it became understood however by ITS FIRST NOTABLE RECRUITS. 45 persons who concerned themselves with the subject, that the .Repeal movement had at last obtained volunteers who, whatever else they might be, were certainly not the ordinary camp followers of O'Connell. The most notable of them were, Thomas Osborne Davis, and John Blake Dillon. In the autumn of 1841, I first met John Dillon. Eighteen months earlier the editor of the Morning Register, a Dublin daily paper which had been the organ of the Catholic Association, and in later years had obtained a reputation for statistics and exact know- ledge not of the liveliest sort, suddenly sailed for the Cape of Good Hope : * and at the same time I, who was sub-editor, went to conduct a journal in Belfast. On my first visit to town I found the editorship of the Register in commission, and its readers in ecstacies of astonishment at finding their usual solid entertain- ment, in which Poor Laws and the Public debt were standing dishes, and where the Castle was treated with suspicious deference, suddenly replaced by speculations on the revival of Protestant nationality, historical parallels from classic and mediaeval history, and even essays on the agencies and conditions of guerilla warfare. Two young barristers, I was told, fresh from college, and strongly suspected by veteran gentlemen of the press to be slightly crazed, had got hold of Alderman Staunton's paper and were playing pranks with it never before seen out of a * This editor was Mr. Hugh Lynar, afterwards an official in the Cape Colony. 46 YOUNG IRELAND. pantomime. Two or three days later I met Dillon at the Register office, sitting in my relinquished chair. The sweet gravity of his countenance, and the simple stately grace of his tall figure, struck me at once. His dress was careless and his car- riage had not then acquired the ease and firmness which afterwards became so natural that they seemed born with him ; but he was a man whom a casual observer could scarcely overlook. Next day I met Davis in the rooms of the Repeal Association. At first sight he seemed to me somewhat arrogant and dogmatic, as men much in earnest are apt to look, but after a little the beaming eagerness of his face, and the depth and piercing timbre of his voice in conversation, mitigated my first impression. It was long afterwards that I knew him for what he truly was, the most modest and unselfish of men, as well as the greatest and best of his generation. Dr. Gray, who had recently become a proprietor of the other daily paper in the popular interest, the Freeman s Journal, was also present, looking preternaturally voung for his position, and overflowing with gay activity.* I had no opportunity of private conver- sation with any of them, but I returned to Belfast persuaded that these young men represented a power which might produce signal results; a power new in modern Irish politics, for it was one which O'Connell had often evoked as the "young blood of Ireland," * Dr. Gray who was born in 1815 was then 26, and looked barely 20, years of age. ITS FIRST NOTABLE RECRUITS. 47 but seldom trusted or employed. Half a year later during: a second visit to town I met Dillon in the o Hall of the Four Courts ; he made me acquainted with Davis, and as we were pleased with each other he proposed that we should walk away to- gether to some place fitter for frank conversation. They put off their gowns and we strolled into the neighbouring Phrenix Park. I learned that they had abandoned the Morning Register. The attempt to put new wine into a damaged utensil of that description had of course failed, and the venerable journal had returned to unmitigated facts and figures. After a long conversation on the prospects of the country we sat down under a noble elm within view of the park gate leading to the city, and there I proposed a project which had been often in my mind from the first time I met them, the establish- ment of a weekly newspaper which we three should own and write. -They listened eagerly to the pro- posal, but they had no money to spare, and were unwilling to accept any responsibility which might involve them in debt. I was able to find capital to a moderate extent, and I solved the difficulty, by undertaking to become sole proprietor if they aided me in the management, and in this arrangement they gladly concurred. I had intended to name the paper the National, from sympathy with the Paris ' journal of that name, but Davis objected that the use of an adjective for such a purpose was con- trary to the analogies of the English language. 48 YOUNG IRELAND. I cited the Constitutional, recently defunct,* but this exception was not an enticing one, and after running over titles suggested by civil and military vigilance, such as the Tribune the Statesman the Sen- tinel the Banner and the like, he reverted to the first suggestion and proposed as an amendment the happy and significant name of the Nation. We desired to make Ireland a nation and the name would be a fitting prelude to the attempt. Before separating we agreed to enlist contributors among our friends, and to publish with the prospectus a list of the writers as a guarantee of moral responsibility for what we taught. John Corne- lius O'Callaghan, who had already begun to work a vein of historical investigation which he has since success- fully developed, the career of Irish soldiers at home and abroad, joined Davis ; Dillon enlisted two of his fellow-students as occasional contributors, whose names were not permitted to appear in the prospectus. Clarence Mangan beginning to be known as the author of racy translations in the Dublin University Magazine, and O'Neil Daunt, formerly member for Mallow, and for a time private secretary to O'Connell promised me their assistance. Mr. Daunt afterwards brought in John O'Connell who as the favourite son of the national leader was counted an important accession, for the prospectus at any rate ; but on the remonstrance of some of the existing journalists who considered themselves injured by the publication of his name in * The Constitutional was the London journal in which Thackeray lost so much time and money. ITS FIRST NOTAT3LE RECRUITS. 49 that chancter, he separated from us before the issue of the first number, and only returned when to be a writer in the Nation had become a distinction worth coveting. The founders of the new journal were all under thirty years of age at that time ; Davis twenty-eight Dillon twenty-seven and their colleague twenty-six ; and it was afterwards noted as a fortunate circumstance for a journal whose primary aim was to represent the entire Irish people, that we were born in different provinces, Munster, Connaught and Ulster, and were all familiar from long residence with Leinster. The editorship was assigned to me as the most experienced in journalism, for I had spent the in- terval between my twentieth and six and twentieth year in newspaper offices, and they had but quite recently stained their fingers with printers' ink. But Davis was our true leader. Not only had nature endowed him more liberally, but he loved labour better, and his mind had traversed regions of thought and wrestled with O o problems, still unfamiliar to his confederates. As these young men were destined to play a re- markable part, the reader will desire to be able to form some picture of them as they were at that time. Davis was a man of middle stature, strongly but not coarsely built with a complexion to which habitual exercise, for he was a great walker, and habitual temperance, gave a healthy glow. A broad brow and strong jaw stamped his face with a character of power, but except when it was lighted by thought or feeling it was plain and even rugged. His carriage was not good; a peculiar habit 50 YOUXG IRELAND. of leaning towards you in familiar conversation, arising from the eagerness of liis nature, gave him the ap- pearance of a stoop, and he dressed and walked as carelessly as a student is apt to do. But his glance was frank and direct as a sunbeam, he had a cordial and winning laugh, the prevailing expression of his face was open and genial, and his voice had tones of sympathy which went straight to the heart. "He was at that time " says one of his early friends Mr. Maddyn* speaking of a period a couple of years earlier than the establishment of the Nation, " as delightful a young man as it was possible to meet with in any country. He was much more joyous than when he became immersed in practical politics. His good spirits did not seem however so much the consequence of youth and health as of his moral nature. His cheerfulness was less the result of temperament than of his sanguine philosophy and of his wholesome happy views of life. The sources of en- joyment were abundant to a man of his large faculties highly cultivated, possessing withal a body which sup- plied him with vigour and energy." Davis was born in Mallow, the traditional ren- dezvous of a gay enjoying gentry, caricatured in song as the " Rakes of Mallow," and the centre of some of the most notable transactions and of the finest scenery in Munster. The history of the country written around him " in chronicles of clay and stone " fed his young imagination with poetry and stored his mind with facts * Private letter penes me from Daniel Owen Macldyn, author of the " Age of Pitt and Fox " " Chiefs of Parties " "Ireland and its Rulers " &c. ITS FIRST NOTABLE RECRUITS. 51 and imagery. His father a military surgeon married a lady who inherited old Irish blood both of the Norman and Celtic stock, and after her husband's death she made her home in her native county. Davis never made any pretensions to birth, but he was entitled to claim a pedigree connecting him with memorable English names. He was, genealogists affirm, a man of old and honorable descent, both on the maternal and paternal side. His mother's family was a branch of the Atkins of Firville in the county Cork sharing also the blood of the O'Sullivans. His great grand- father Sir Jonathan Atkins of GHvensdale in Yorkshire was governor of Guernsey in the seventeenth century and left by his first wife, Mary daughter of Sir Eichard Howard of Neworth Castle Cumberland, and sister of the first earl of Carlisle, three sons, the second of whom settled at Fountain ville County Cork and was the maternal ancestor of Davis. His father James Thomas Davis a surgeon in- the Royal Artillery and Acting Deputy-Inspector of Ordnance Hospitals in the Penin- sula, the representative of a Buckinghamshire family originally from Wales died at Exeter in 1814. His mother and her family consisting at the time of two sons and a daughter settled at Mallow where Thomas Davis was born. His boyhood seems to have been marked by peculiarities which seldom fail to distinguish the youth of poets and thinkers. He was shy, retiring, unready, and self absorbed. One of his kinswomen, who judged him as the good people judged who mistook the young swan for an ugly duck, assured me that he E 2 52 'YOUNG IRELAXP. was a dull child. He could scarcely be taught his letters, and she often heard the schoolboy stuttering through ' My name is Norval ' in a way that was pitiable to see. When he had grown up if you asked him the day of the month the odds were he could not tell you. He never was any good at hand-ball or hurling, and knew no more than a fool how to take care of the money his father left him. She saw him more than once in tears, listening to a common country fellow playing old airs on a riddle, or sitting in a drawing room as if he were in a dream, when other young people were enjoying, themselves. Which facts I doubt not are authentic, though the narrator somewhat mistook their signi- ficance. Milton in painting his own inspired youth, has left a picture which will be true for ever of the class of which he was a chief : "When I was yet a child no childish play To ine was pleasing ; all my mind was set Serious to learn and know ; and thence to do What might be public good : myself I thought Born to that end. born to promote all truth All righteous things. Davis was educated in Trinity College where he was chiefly noted as a steady reader. It was remarked afterwards with wonder how little impression he made on his fellow students ; some of the most brilliant of them it is said en- tertaining a lively contempt for the silent devourer of books, who never competed for the social or rhetorical success so dear to young Irishmen. But his friends of these early days insist that his character and temper under- ITS FIRST NOTABLE RECRUITS. 53 went a remarkable change after a year or two at college. From being retiring and cold he became frank and winning. In 1838 when he was four-and- twenty, he was called to the Bar, having shortly before written a Whig Radical pamphlet on the House of Lords.* Mr. Maddyn who first met him in the College Historical Society after his call, has furnished me with a graphic picture of him at that era. The society which was founded by Edmund Burke a century before, and had trained three generations of Irish orators and states- men, was at this time exiled from the College which gave it a name. It held its meetings in Radley's Hotel f where a number of young men who afterwards became more or less distinguished in various depart- ments of public life, were attracting audiences by vehement and flamboyant eloquence. Isaac Butt, Joseph Le Fanu, and Joseph Pollock, had retired, but Torrens McCullagh, Thomas Wallis, James O'Hea, William Keogh and Thomas MacNevin still held high debate, and cultivated a rhetoric too obviously borrowed from the historic contests in the Irish Parliament. j "A short * The Reform of the Lords By a graduate of the Dublin University Dublin 1837. The pamphlet which advocated an elected Upper House is written in a style wholly wanting the colour and animation which marked his later writings. f Dame Street, Dublin. J When Torrens McCullagh is mentioned in this narrative the reader ought to know that he is identical with Mr. McCullagh Torrens, the member for Finsbury. Joseph Le Farm is the same who afterwards won reputation as a novelist. Mr. Keogh is the late Judge Keogh ; Thomas Wallis originally a tutor in Trinity College was a writer in the Daily News at the time of his death in 1864 ; and Isaac Butt was the late leader of the Home Rule Party in the House of Commons. Mr. Pollock who finally went to the English Bar, was son of the Joseph Pollock an Irish Barrister whose " Letters of Owen Roe " are familiar to readers of the Anti- Union pamphlets. OfMacNevinandO'Hea it will be necessary to speak later. 54 YOUNG IRELAND. thick-set young man about four and twenty wrapped in a fearnought coat shambled into the room one evening and spoke to several of the members in a tone between jest and earnest. 'Who is that?' I asked. 'That' (whispered MacNevin) ' is the cataract that is to sweep away the House of Lords.' ' But the gibe did not prevent Maddyn from being favourably impressed by the frank honesty of the new comer's face, and his large well opened eyes. An intimacy ensued and the manli- ness and sincerity of his nature struck his new friend more than his intellect, which seemed tame among the vigorous athletes and brilliant literary coxcombs of the University. His college career had been solid and respectable rather than distinguished. He won a silver medal in ethics when the examination was un- usually severe and his reading was known to be far wider in its range than was the custom of the day. The aim of his studies may be gathered from an obser- vation of Maddyn's in the letter already quoted. " He was a Church of England man of the older and more liberal school, and was a frequent reader of Jeremy Taylor and the divines of the seventeenth century. He had sometimes a bold manner of putting his thoughts which might mislead an ignorant person, but no man was more averse than he from licentious philosophy or from profane discourse. I never recollect him speaking- with levity on serious subjects. His frame of mind was naturally reverent and the authors he habitually read were not of the mocking school. He rejoiced that the late excellent Dr. Lloyd had given moral philosophy so prominent a place in the college course. He wished that Ireland should produce more statesmen of action than mere ITS FIEST NOTABLE RECRUITS. 55 orators, more philosophers and historians than novelists and sparkling litterateurs, and he thought that the change made by Dr. Lloyd would have a serious effect in awakening many a mind and emancipating it from the routine of mere mechanical training. From his earliest days that a high moral spirit should be raised among the upper classes was his eager desire." Maddyn was of opinion that in 1838 Davis had not yet felt any sympathy with Irish nationality. He looked, lie says, more like a young Englishman than an Irishman. He was always at work and was- dis- tinguished by broad massive and robust qualities rather than the brighter, and more brilliant charac- teristics of his nation. But he showed at times an ardour so vehement and at the same time so tender as vindicated the Celt. One who knew him earlier * however assured me that his Irish sympathies were not of recent birth. When they were in London as law students about .1836 some generous allusion to the Irish character on the stage made the tears fall silently from Davis, whom up to that moment his companion had believed to be a Unionist and Utilitarian. In 1840 he was elected auditor of the Historical Society its highest executive office, but some of his associates of that day used to confess in after times with self reproach, and as a warning against rash judgments, that even then he was not understood or appreciated and that one of them had fixed a nick- name upon him implying essential and hopeless * Mr. J. F. Farrell of the Irish Bar. 56 YOUNG IRELAND. mediocrity. The Anglo Irish differ from their Celtic countrymen in not being a precocious race ; Swift obtained his bachelor's degree -syjecia/i f/raiid, Sheridan was pronounced by his schoolmaster to be " an in- corrigible dunce," Goldsmith could not graduate, and Curran when he reached early mauhood was still known as " Orator Mum." The simplicity and manliness of Davis' character unfitted him for wordy and aimless contests, but he liked the His- torical Society because it was the alternative of in- tellectual stagnation. Among his contemporaries some young men of considerable parts, and of preten- sions still greater than their parts, derided the system of College honours and declared they would not con- tend for such puerile objects of ambition. To read only to obtain materials for rhetorical fireworks was not a high object, but it was better than not reading at all, and Davis' subsequent career renders it highly probable that this motive lay at the root of the pains and labour he bestowed on a society where he never made any attempt to shine. The address which he delivered according to practice on assuming office, was an intense appeal to his contemporaries to think for themselves, even if they made mistakes, rather than become echoes or puppets.* Some of the leaders of * The address was dedicated to the memory of Francis Kearney, S.T.C.D., a young man who left a great reputation, still fondly cherished by a few disciples. As there are persons who insist that the modern movement in the Church of England which began at Oxford, originated, not with Dr. Newman or Dr. Pusey, but with Mr. Alexander Knox, so some of his contemporaries persist in tracing the national movement which began in Trinity College at this time, not to the men who led and inter- preted it, but to Francis Kearney. A generous young man is sure to form ITS FIRST NOTABLE RECRUITS. 57 this Society, established a monthly magazine in Dublin called the Citizen, citizen of course not of the type of John Grilpin, but in the sense the title suggested in Athens or Kome. At first Davis was not a contributor, but when others wearied and fell off he took up the burthen of the work. His papers were the studies of a statesman. He examined for example the land tenure in the northern countries of Europe and compared it with the tenure established in Ireland by English law. He investigated the character and origin of English rule in India. The Irish Parliament of James II. which has been systematically misrepresented he made the subject of a careful review, and reprinted several of its acts in extensoio vindicate its moderate and practical character.* But the reading public in Ireland was very limited, the class whom historical investigation interested a mere handful, and the periodical, which had under- gone various changes of shape and title, had to be maintained in existence by private contributions, chiefly from the purse of William Eliot Hudson and a few of his friends. f It was during the decline of an inordinate estimate of the friend who first gave his mind the impulse in a particular direction ; and it is certain Davis attributed to Francis Kearney, to Torreus M'Cullagh,and to Thomas Wallis some results which his friends consider were more properly attributable to himself. * Mr. Lecky, in a note on the History of England in the Eighteenth Century, expresses a strong desire that the notices of James's Parliament should be republished. I have found among Davis's papers a plan for the republication of them, which I trust will render the undertaking easy and certain. He proposed to name the volumes " The Patriot Parliament of 1689, with the Statutes, biographical notices of King Lords and Commons, &c. Edited by Thomas Davis, Barrister at Law." f Mr. Hudson was Taxing Master in the Irish Exchequer and brother to a dean of the Irish Establishment. He was a man of ( fine intellect cultivated taste and warm affections ; his income was dispensed for the most part in promoting Irish art and literature. 58 YOUNG IRELAND. the Citizen that Davis and Dillon (who with a keener eye for merit than some of his fellow students had grown to love and follow Davis) attempted to use the Morning Register as a vehicle for their opinions. The attempt began in a characteristic manner. The Mel- bourne administration had for Irish Chancellor a man who had held a foremost place in the Irish Parliament when Grattan and Bushe were his associates, and a foremost place in the Imperial Parliament when Canning and Brougham were his rivals, and the cabinet coerced this distinguished Irishman to aban- don his office in order to confer it for a few weeks on Mr., afterwards Lord, Campbell, whose importunity was becoming troublesome. O'Connell who detested Plunket from of old, made no sign, and the popular press had fallen asleep at the feet of the Whigs. Failing their seniors some members of the junior bar led by Mr. Torrens M'Cullagh, met to protest against this cynical insult to their profession and their country. Dillon sent an article anonymously to the Register in support of their remonstrance. It was published and attracted immediate attention ; the author was enquired after and in a few weeks the two young barristers, who were probably jointly responsible for it, had the control of a daily paper and " could drop the same thought into a thousand minds at the same minute."* Another incident in their connection with the Register deserves to be mentioned. The E-oyal Dublin Society a philo- sophical institution supported by a grant from Parlia- De Tocqueville. ITS FIRST NOTABLE RECRUITS. 59 ment managed as every public institution in Dublin was then managed chiefly by Conservatives, in a freak of insolent bigotry black balled Dr. Murray the Catholic Archbishop of Dublin. The aged prelate a man of moderate and even courtly politics, and who for his private virtues was named the St. Francis de Sales of the Irish Church, had afforded no justification for such an affront ; and the public indignation was intense. Lord Morpeth then Chief Secretary intimated that the Government would withdraw the annual grant unless the insult was atoned for; and there was a general assent in the popular press that the Society ought to be permitted to perish of inanition. Davis, who from the first hour of his public life looked beyond party to national interests, faced the outcry and rebuked it. He reminded the people that the institution which they wanted to destroy was founded by an Irish Par- liament when Ireland had a national life, was fostered like a child by Irish statesmen, and was almost the last native institution which the gothic rage of English centralization had spared. To defend such a society may in our day seem a natural and obvious duty, but if it seem so, the teaching of Thomas Davis, more than any other agency, has wrought the change of feeling which enables some Irishmen to rate the interest of the nation above the interest of the party whose cockade they wear. At that time Ireland was still divided into two hostile camps, each of which looked upon the humiliation of the other as its proper gain. A year before he joined the Repeal Association Davis 60 YOUNG IRELAND. had a casual correspondence with Savage Landor, whom he loved for the generosity of his impetuous politics, and admired for his originality and fertility of intellect. After the correspondents were in the grave, the letters were made public and we obtain a clear insight into the feelings which the young Protestant student, issuing from a Conservative connection, cherished towards the Catholic people and their representative men. " I am glad " (thus Davis wrote to Landor) " to find you have hopes for Ireland. You have always had a good word and I am sure good wishes for her. If you knew Mr. Mathew you would relish his simple and downright manners. He is joyous friendly and quite unassuming. To have taken away a degrading and impoverishing vice from the hearts and habits of three millions of people in a couple of years seems to justify any praise to Mr. Mathew, and also to justify much hope for the people. And suffer me to say that if you knew the difficulties under which the Irish struggle and the danger from England and from the Irish oligarchy, you would not regret the power of the political leaders, or rather Leader here ; you would forgive the exciting speeches and perchance sympathise with the exertions of men who think that a domestic government can alone unite and animate all our people. Surely the desire of nationality is not ungenerous ; nor is it strange in the Irish (looking to their history) ; nor considering the population of Ireland, and the nature and situation of their home is the expectation of it very wild."* Dillon was widely different from his friend in appear- ance and in some marked characteristics. In person he was tall and strikingly handsome, with eyes like a * Forster's Life of Savage Landor. ITS FIRST NOTABLE RECRUITS. 01 thoughtful woman's, and the clear olive complexion and stately bearing of a Spanish noble. His generous nature made him more of a philanthropist than a politician. He was born and reared in Connaught among the most abject and oppressed population in Europe, and all his studies and projects had direct relation to the condition of the people. Codes, tenures and social theories were his familiar reading, as history and biography were an inspiration to the more powerful imagination of Davis. He followed in the track of Bentham and de Tocqueville and recognised a regulated democracy as the inevitable and rightful ruler of the world; and he saw with burning impatience the wrongs inflicted on the industrious poor by an aristocracy practically irresponsible. Davis desired a national existence for Ireland that an old historic state might be raised from the dust, and a sceptre placed in her hand, that thus she might become the mother of a brave and self-reliant race. Dillon desired a national existence primarily to get rid of social degradation and suffering which it wrung his heart to witness without being able to relieve. He was neither morose nor cynical but he had one instinct in common with Swift, the villanies of mankind made his blood boil. In moral nature he closely resembled his comrade. He had the same sim- plicity and unselfishness, and to him also falsehood or equivocation was impossible. He was grave with the sweet gravity which comes from habitual thought. Mr. Bright a quarter of a century later remarked " that there was that in his eye and in the tone of his voice and in his manner altogether which marked 62 YOUNG IRELAND. him for an honourable and a just man." * And a still better judge of character, Mr. Thackeray, assured me in latter years, that among the half dozen men in the United States whom he loved to remember, the modesty and wholesome sweetness of Dillon, then a political refugee, gave him a foremost place. Under a stately and some- what reserved demeanour lay latent the simplicity and joyousness of a boy. No one was readier to laugh with frank cordiality, or to give and take the pleasant banter which lends a relish to the friendship of young men. On one occasion his neglect of an appointment induced me to inquire ironically after his health as the only con- ceivable justification for his remissness. "Yes, my dear D.," he wrote back, " I have been laid up for the last two days, mostly in bed but it was with the 'Mysteries of Paris.' ' Dillon sprang from a middle class family engaged in commercial pursuits and had been originally Designed for the Catholic priesthood. But after passing some years in Maynooth College he doubtless discovered that he had not the necessary vocation, for he ultimately determined to become a barrister. He had been Davis's fellow student in Trinity and succeeded him as auditor of the Historical Society, but he shrank from self-display and was seldom heard of in its debates. There was but one essential difference between the two friends. Dillon was a man of remarkable talents carefully cultivated, of lofty purpose sustained by steady courage, and of as pure and generous a nature as ever was given to man ; but * Speeches of the Right Hon. John Bright, speech in Dublin October 31st 1866. ITS FIRST NOTABLE RECRUITS. 63 Davis was all this and the mysterious something besides which is implied in saying that he was a man of genius. The first number of the Nation was published on the 15th October 1S42. The prospectus and the list of contributors had excited unusual interest and it was eagerly waited for.* In shape, size, distribution of materials and typography, it departed from the ordinary practice of Irish journals which were immethodical and slovenly in that day. And the new form was designed to typify a new spirit. It took a motto which expressed its exact purpose. When Municipal Reform was before Parliament Peel asked contemptuously what good cor- porations would do a country so poor as Ireland ? "I will tell the right honourable gentleman " said Stephen Woulfe, afterwards Chief Baron, " they will go far to create and foster public opinion and make it racy of the soil." This was the aim of the Nation and we took for motto " To create and foster public opinion in Ireland and make it racy of the soil." f A quantity of the new paper was printed considerably in excess of the number issued by the most popular journals in Dublin ; but before the close of the day the edition was exhausted and as the type had been distributed copies were selling for two or three times the published price. At the present day the first number will fetch thirty or forty * The Prospectus is printed at the end of the Chapter. It was written by Davis except one sentence. t Woulf e's friend and biographer Mr. Curran remarks that he has left no memorable saying but this motto, and in truth even this one is scarcely original. It bears too close a resemblance to a sentence in Macaulay's Essay on BoswelFs Johnson. " We know no production of the human mind* which has so much of what may be called the race, so much of the peculiar flavour of the soil from which it sprung." 64 YOUNG IRELAXD. times the published price. It contained articles by Davis, Dillon, and the Editor and poems by Clarence Mangan and O'Callaghan. Tested by the subsequent character of the paper it was feeble and immethodic ; but contrasted with contemporary journalism a different verdict was pronounced by the public.* The teaching of the new journal had it been care- lessly written, would probably have arrested attention by its originality. It was not an echo of the Associa- tion or its leader, as national journals had commonly * The day the journal appeared Davis wrote to his friend Daniel Owen Maddyn whose help as a reviewer he desired to secure : " The Nation sold its whole impression of No. I. before twelve o'clock this morning, and could have sold twice as many more if they had been printed, as they ought to have been but the fault is on the right side. The office window was actually broken by the newsmeu in their impatience to get more. The article called ' The Nation ' is by Duffy, ' Aristocratic Institutions ' by Dillon, ' The First Number ' by Maugan, ' Ancient Irish Literature ' ' The Epigram, on Stanley ' and the capital ' Extermi- nators' Song ' are by O'Callaghan. The article on ' The English Army in Afghanistan, &c.,' the mock proclamation to the Irish soldiers, and the reviews of the two Dublin magazines are by myself. . . . The articles you propose will do admirably in your hands. Duffy is the very greatest admirer of the sketches of Brougham and Peel that I ever met. [Sketches by Maddyn in the Dublin Monthly Magazine.] Perhaps in a newspaper the points should be more salient and the writing more rough and uncom- promising than in a magazine. Duffy seems to think that if number three, your lightest dare-devilish potheen article were to come first, it would most readily fall in with the rest of the arrangements." Davis to Maddyn, Oct. 15, '42. And shortly after he wrote : " Duffy and I are delighted at your undertaking the notice of Father Mathew. In your hands and with your feeling the article will be worthy of the man. The por rait of him will not be out of Landell's hands for a little time. The Shiel or the Avonmore and O'Loughlin would probably come best next. 4.000 copies to-day equal to the Freeman and double any other weekly paper. The country people are delighted with us if their letters speak true. We have several ballads, aye and not bad ones ready ; 'noctes' squibs &c. in preparation. " In the present number, ' The Reduction of Rents ' and the Conti- nental Literature with the translation from La Mennais ^who has I see turned missionary) are by Dillon. 'The O'Connell Tribute' is by Daunt (aided by Duffy's revision and my quotation from Burke). ' The .Revolu- tion in Canada ' and ' An Irish Vampire ' are mine." ITS FIRST NOTABLE RECRUITS. 65 been, but struck out a distinct course for itself. O'Con- nell, as we have seen, had appealed to the material interests of the people ; hje insisted that trade and commerce withered and national and individual pros- perity declined under the Union. But there were lessons of profounder influence over the human breast which he had not attempted to teach. Passion and imagination have won victories which reason and self interest would have attempted in vain, and it was on these subtle forces the young men mainly counted. The complaint of Ireland had been contemptuously described as a beggar's petition ; they were of opinion that it ought rather to be presented as a new Petition of Eights ; the claim of an ancient historic nation, which had been robbed of its constitution, stated with scrupulous fairness, but stated as from equal to equal, and persisted in to all extremities, should it need martyrs like Eliot or soldiers like Hampden. And though long servitude had left the mass of the people not only ignorant of the historic past, but ignorant of contemporary events beyond the narrow horizon of their personal experience, there was a generation issuing from college, and from the national schools, and gathered into the Temperance Societies, who, it might be hoped, would constitute a fit audience for lessons of more informed and generous patriotism. They commenced from the first number to treat the case of Ireland, and the claim to have her constitution restored, in a tone disused since the time when a Senate and citizen army still existed to give significance to the national senti- 66 YOUNG IRELAND. merits. The historic names dimly remembered by the people as of men upon whom the law had left the stain of blood or banishment, and who had been generally ignored by later writers, or named only as examples of unwise enthusiasm, were reinstated on their pedestals, and treated as Scotland treats the memory of Wallace or Poland treats the memory of Kosciusko. Foreign affairs were considered primarily as they affected the interests of Ireland, not as they affected the in- terests of England. The rights and feelings of Pro- testant Irishmen were discussed with scrupulous respect and fairness, but their monopolies and prejudices de- nounced. And week after week songs were published full of passionate longing for the revival of an Irish nation, uttered in language which the timid called sedition, but which was merely the long silenced voice of national self-respect. It is impossible at this time to realise the amazement, the consternation swelling almost to panic, and the final enthusiasm and intoxication of joy with which the new teaching was received, especially by the young of all classes. Every number of the Nation contained new trains of thought, new projects and suggestions, new poems and essays, which thrilled the national mind like electric shocks. The ideas were sometimes crude and extravagant, and often fanciful and unpractical, but they were always generous in design, and there are few Irish- men of any party who deny that they wonderfully elevated and purified the spirit of the country. The success of this teaching has made it familiar and perhaps ITS FIRST NOTABLE RECRUITS. 67 commonplace ; this narrative however would be in- complete without some brief account of it. But teaching is successful in proportion as it accom- modates itself to the need of those who are to be taught. It must not be forgotten that the Ireland which the young writers addressed was widely different from the Ireland of to-day. Great calamities and notable con- cessions have fundamentally changed it, and a factor which proved in the end to be a more powerful solvent of national prejudice than either calamities or conces- sions, the new doctrines which they taught. It is difficult to describe its condition at that time without seeming to employ the language of exaggera- tion. All external symbols of nationality were nearly as effectually banished from Dublin as they were banished from Warsaw under the Cossack, or from Venice under the Austrian. There was not the monu- ment of a single Irishman in the metropolis ; so that a foreigner was said to have inquired after examining the statues of German, English, and Dutch personages, whether Ireland had produced no man entitled to be perpetuated in marble ! And this blank existed not only where the state had control, but more fatally in places where it marked the decay of national feeling in the community. It was mentioned in an early number of the journal that the sculptors' shops having been visited, Shakespeares and Scotts, Homers and Dantes were found in abundance, but the bust of scarcely one man of Irish birth except the Duke of Wellington. In other capitals the streets are named after memorable F 2 G3 YOUNG IRELAND. victories, or illustrious n\en, or historic houses, and help to foster a national spirit ; Belgium commemorates in them her great interests, France her great battles. In Dublin they were named after a long line of for- gotten English officials, Essex and Dorset, Harcourt and Sackville; and neither the great Celtic houses of O'Neill and O'Brien, or the great Norrnan houses of Fitzgerald and Butler, neither Jonathan Swift nor Luke Wadding, Patrick Sarsfield nor Owen O'Neil, Burke nor Goldsmith, Curran nor Plunket gave a title to a single street square or bridge in the metropolis. In the system of national education the geography and topography of Ireland were placed on a par with the geography and topography of Scotland and Switzerland, and Irish history and biography were strictly excluded. A generation earlier John Keogh, the Catholic leader of that day, declared that you might recognize a Catholic on the street by his timid gait ; and the bulk of the national party were still Catholics who had not wholly outgrown the traditions of slavery. Intellectually it was a period of reaction and depres- sion. The enthusiasm of the Catholic contest had passed away. The flame lighted by the genius of Moore, and which Banim and Griffin, Callanan and Lady Morgan had kept alive, burned low. Whatever litera- ture existed in Ireland belonged to the party dominant in Church and State. The class who lived by letters was not numerous, but it was in a decisive degree English in spirit and sympathy. The societies con- nected with antiquities and art were in the hands of ITS FIRST NOTABLE RECRUITS. 69 Conservatives or Whigs. There were not half a dozen men among the governing bodies who would have pro- fessed themselves Repealers, or to whom the name of O'Connell did not sound like an alarm bell. The one prosperous publisher was a Conservative, the one suc- cessful periodical* was more hostile to Irish ideas than the Times. A fierce no popery spirit coloured the writings of the Conservative press, and was rendered more bitter and intractable by the zeal of deserters. The man of most authentic genius in fiction, though born and bred a Catholic, had allied himself with the dominant party. The chief organ of the Conservatives was conducted by a journalist of ability who had once belonged to the creed he habitually assailed. The prevailing influence in politics and literature in the last resort was understood to reside in the Rev. Mortimer O'Sullivan, a controversialist of unusual vigour and resources ; but who had changed from the persecuted to the prosperous creed, f In party journals the people were described every day as rebels and assassins whom no law could tame. The provincial papers fed this spirit, by exaggerating, and sometimes inventing, agrarian disturbances. " The State of the Country " was a standing heading in their * Dublin University Magazine. f Mr. O'Sullivan carried with him into his new connection a brother who also became a clergyman of the Established Church and an indefatig- able writer of polemics. They were both men of fine presence and athletic proportions. Lever in one of his wild skits in the University Magazine describes a salmon he caught in the Bann as being almost as long as (Sam O'Sullivan) and nearly as broad in the shoulders as (Murty). Mortimer's ability could not be denied, but censorious critics used to discriminate between him and his brother Sam by designat- ing the latter Sham O'Sullivan. 70 YOUNG IRELAND. columns. With all these writers Irish was a word of reproach. Irish ideas and Irish arguments were like Irish diamonds, the worst of their class. The gentry and clergy of the party on whose support they rested generally enjoyed the sport, for they were in possession of profitable monopolies doomed to perish the moment England ceased to be deceived, or Ireland to be cowed. Among the Whigs who had thrown off sectarian bigotry, and were liberal in their politics and their sympathies, there was little national feeling. They had accepted for the most part English rules of taste and opinion; and they were nurtured on a literature of which some of the greatest masters from Spenser and Milton, to Carlyle and Thackeray in a later day, have been contemptuous and unjust to Ireland. Foreign politics and foreign literature came to Dublin exclu- sively through the English press ; no Irish journal maintained a continental correspondent or with rare exceptions reviewed a foreign book. There was no periodical of national sympathies except the moribund Citizen under one of its transformations. Books were dear and only to be obtained in the great towns ; there were several counties without a regular bookseller's shop. Stamped paper, going free through the post-office, was the sole medium through which the mind of the people could be reached. In the London literature which concerned itself with Ireland and sought an audience there, Maxwell had begun to paint as Irish types the dashing dragoons and gossiping campaigners who afterwards swarmed in ITS FIRST NOTABLE RECRUITS. 71 such a multitude from the brain of Lever ; and Carleton, who described the peasantry with genuine knowledge and power, still mixed with his colours the black bile of sectarianism. On the stage the Irishman familiar to the Adelphi and unknown in Munster a blundering simpleton or a prodigious fire-eater, was habitually pre- sented to Dublin audiences for their applause. The English idea of Ireland was chiefly derived from sources like these, and a bewildered Cockney reared on the libels and caricatures of the day, on his return from a visit to Dublin, is said to have assured his friends that he could not find a single Irishman in the country. The songs sung in places of public recreation were in the main some grotesque distortion of Irish manners, like Bryan O'Lynn or Barney Brallaghan. The Gaelic songs which still circulated in the cabins were entirely unknown in the workshops or taverns. These habits and practices told fatally on the people themselves. Sayings circulated among them which accepted the assumption of their enemies that they were an inferior race, such as " an Irishman must have leave to speak twice " or " hunt him like a Redshank ; " a Redshank being the Anglo-Irish nickname for a native who did not submit to military authority after the fall of Limerick. They greatly misjudged themselves. In truth the poor freeholders who had voted against their landlords to win Catholic Emancipation, though they knew that eviction from their homes would probably follow, had exhibited a fortitude beside which military courage is poor and vulgar, and they and their fore- 72 YOUNG IRELAND. fathers had shown a persistence in maintaining their religious convictions, against persecution and temptation, which on a more conspicuous stage would have been recognised by mankind as heroic. But they only saw their visage in the mirror presented by their enemies. No school book of Irish history was in use in any Irish school at that time, w r hile English history was universally taught. Whatever a boy learned of the story of his own country was from gossip or tradition, and was in general a mass of confused fable. The books which circulated most extensively in the pro- vinces were the " Seven Champions of Christendom," " The Irish Rogues and Rapparees," " The Life of Freeny the Robber," " The Battle of Aughrim," and in Ulster, " Billy Bluff," and " Paddy's Resource." The " Champions of Christendom" professes to contain " the honourable births, noble achievements, by sea and land in divers strange countries, and wonderful adventures in deserts, wildernesses, and enchanted castles, of St. George of England, St. Denis of France, St. James of Spain, St. Anthony of Italy, St. Andrew of Scotland, St. Patrick of Ireland, and St. David of Wales." It opens by recounting how, " Not long after the destruc- tion of Troy sprung up these seven wonders of the world/' and is in all respects a fair specimen of the popular chronology and geography of the period. The Irish Rapparees (or Tories) were disbanded soldiers of the Irish army which submitted to William III. at Limerick. The bulk of the garrison went to France, but some remained and became a terror to the Puritan ITS FIRST NOTABLE RECRUITS. 73 settlers, and were treated by the English Government in Dublin as banditti. With their memoirs, which supply as natural a subject for popular sympathy as the adventures of Robin Hood or Rob Roy, there got mixed up stories of modern highwaymen and burglars in a manner very characteristic of the state of historical knowledge in the country. " The Battle of Aughrim " is a play composed in pedantic and stilted verse, modelled on Dry den's rhymed dramas. It was written soon after the event in the interest of the conquerors, but in the end became universally popular with the descendants of the conquered race, because their historic men were treated with a certain dramatic truth, with which they were delighted, at a time when the printing press was in the exclusive possession of their enemies. " Billy Bluff " is a series of humorous and graphic letters on the state of the country, contributed in 1796 by a Presbyterian clergyman, the Reverend James Porter, to the Northern Star, .the organ of the United Irishmen in Belfast. He opens with an ironical complaint that he is in danger of being hanged by the neighbouring squire for his political opinions. Half a century later I stood by his tombstone in Grey Abbey, County Down, the ruins of a sumptuous monastery founded by John de Courcy twenty generations earlier where it is re- corded that "he departed this life in his forty-fifth year;" the stout Presbyter having in fact been hanged at his own door by the squire in question for his con- nection with the insurrection of '98, the pasquinades of " Billy Bluff" included. " Paddy's Resource," which the 74 YOUNG IRELAND. people with their invariable habit of translating words of unknown import into some familiar phrase call Paddy's Racehorse, is a collection of songs from the Northern Star, some of them ridiculing " Billy Pitt " and lauding General Buonaparte and Tom Paine, or glorifying the " Carmagnole " in terms which must have sorely puzzled the farm labourers and tradesmen of Ulster, among whom however it continued to circu- late for two or three generations. These last-named volumes were still issued from the Belfast press and sold by pedlars throughout the North in 1840 without a printer's name, as if Fitzgibbon and Castlereagh were on the watch to put the publisher in the pillory. If I add to these the "Hibernian Tales," a collection of native stories, and " Ward's Cantoes," a burlesque history of the Reformation, not without some touches of Hudibrastic humour, the books known to the people will be exhausted. One phase in Irish history had indeed been kept alive in the public memory, incidents which could be employed for party purposes in the contest for religious equality. Imputed Popish massa- cres, often as fabulous as the inventions of Titus Gates, and unsuccessful insurrections shrieked from Grange platforms as a warning against conceding Catholic Emancipation ; and the broken Treaty of Limerick, and the persecuting laws of the Stuarts thundered in reply ; but for the graver and worthier parts of our annals, the popular mind was almost a blank. There were of course antiquaries and men of studious habits, who not only maintained the study but ITS FIRST NOTABLE RECRUITS. 75 pursued it with the close and loving familiarity which generous men are apt to hestow upon whatever is unduly slighted ; but among the educated classes generally, though the knowledge was not extinct it was inexact, and coloured by the unfriendly source from which it was necessarily derived.* Beyond a vague sense of disaster and injustice the mass of the people knew little of the past. I can remember hearing when a boy from some of the seanachies, to whom I was always ready to listen, a story of " the time of the troubles " in which the massacre in Eathlin (under Charles I.) and the cruelties of the Ancient Britons f (under George III.) made part of the same transaction. Besides Brian Borhoime (Brian of the Tributes) the national hero, there were no names historic among the people except Patrick Sarsfield, Henry Grattan, and Lord Edward Fitzgerald ; one a figure huge enough to make itself visible over the whole of the conflict with England ; the others, except Sarsfield, men of yesterday. The leaders of '98 would doubtless have furnished other popular idols but that O'Connell habitually disparaged them, and their names were seldom mentioned on the public platform. It was the * The Irish Penny Magazine and the Dublin Penny Journal in which Petrie, O'Donovan, Eugene Curry and others wrote on Irish antiquities in a cautious and sober strain not always employed in that department of learning, made some way among the middle class between 1830 and 1840, but not much. Mr. Ferguson (now Sir Samuel Ferguson, Q.C., Deputy Keeper of the Records in Ireland), had also by a series of articles in The Dublin University Magazine on the Attractions and Capabilities of Ireland turned the attention of students to national subjects, but the circulation of the magazine was almost exclusively among the gentry and Protestant clergy. f A Welsh militia regiment quartered in Ireland in 1798. 76 YOUNG IRELAND. policy of the opponents of Emancipation to represent the Catholics as rebels by principle and from the neces- sity of their position; and he thought it essential to deny that they were rebels or had any sympathy with rebels, and in pursuing this policy he was often unjust to the dead. He went further indeed, and insisted on the marvellous theory that Catholics were not only necessarily loyal from the duty of obedience to lawful authority which they were taught, but passionately devoted to the reigning dynasty and the English con- nection. The Catholics were no doubt taught obedience and loyalty, and had sometimes reason to prefer the policy of St. James to the policy of the Castle ; but human nature is not so constituted that the mass of mankind can long love what injures and humiliates them, under whatever sanction the claim may be made. In lieu of a national literature the speeches of O'Connell and Sheil fed the appetite for legendary poetry which can never be suppressed in a Celtic people. There they at least heard of their country as something which it was noble to love and serve ; and they naturally imitated the performances which they admired. Speech making was a universal recreation. It was no uncom- mon thing to hear half a score of harangues uttered of an evening over a private dinner table. " Who," I have heard a gentleman demand of a dozen of his guests, a few years earlier, standing aloft and waving his right hand fiercely, " who wrung the Magna Gfiarta from the pusillanimous John on the plains of Runnymede between Staines and Windsor? Who but the Catholic barons ITS FIRST NOTABLE RECRUITS. 77 upon whose descendants they have shut the door of Par- liament." But sometimes the discourse was more adrem. In 1826, when I was ten years of age, my native county was agitated by a contested election between two local families, of one of whom I found myself a prodigious partisan, without knowing particularly why. A shrewd attorney at my guardian's table let in a flood of light on my mind by one of the inevitable speeches of the evening. " What's Henry Westenra to us ? I have been asked " he said. " Why, everything. The right to live on equal terms with our neighbours, the right not to be insulted in our own houses by Orange processions or harangued from the bench by Orange judges or Orange justices. What's Westenra to us ? Nothing at all as Westenra ; but as the candidate pledged to Catholic Emancipation something more than our daily bread, and dearer than the children by our firesides." Songs were also common at every dinner table, and some rude local ballad was ordinarily the favourite. I have seen tears fall like rain as a man familiar with " the time of the troubles " sang in slow tender tones of genuine feeling " The Lord in His mercy be good to Belfast, The poor Irish exile she soothed as he passed," or faces flush with pride over Eory O'Moore ; not Sam Lover's spalpeen, but the grand Rory of 1641. " Now the taunt and the threat let the coward endure ; Our hope is in God and in Rory O'More." The audience never seemed to have too much of 78 YOUNG- IEELAND. Rory, and for my part I knew his achievements better than the multiplication table.* From this people there might have been drawn an army inflamed with courage and enthusiasm, and capable of great endurance and perfect discipline ; but for a civil contest, whose chief weapon is informed opinion, they were not so well equipped. And the Union no longer rested on British authority alone. The Protestant gentry and clergy guarded it more effectually than the military garrison. The bulk of them delibe- rately preferred the English connection with all its con- sequences. The chief prizes of the state and the profuse endowments of the church furnish obvious motives : but they understand human nature imperfectly who do not recognise that it was intrinsically easier for the Catholic to forget his wrongs than for the Protestant to forget his long ascendancy. Others who did not prefer the Union regarded it as inevitable. Some hated O'Connell * In the kitchen the entertainment was only slightly varied to suit a simpler taste. Living in an Orange district where armed processions and summons by beat of drum were not unfrequent, it made a boy's heart beat fast with a lively enjoyment to hear the anti-orange song " Up to Keady we will go And see who daar oppose us." The singer most familiar to my memory was deeply read in Pastorini's prophecies," and disposed to do a little prophecy occasionally on his own account, always of a dreadfully sanguinary hue. There was something mysterious and wonderfully impressive in the manner in which he deli- vered this mystical sentiment as the preface to a glass of whisky. " Here's the white eagle with the green wing, A bloody summer and a new king." I puzzled my youthful mind excessively over that party-coloured bird, and I am not clear yet whether it was the eagle that grasped the thunder- bolt of the Western Republic, or the eagle that once perched on the standard of Bonaparte, that was to acquire the green wing and bring about the other results indicated by the oracle. ITS FIRST NOTABLE RECRUITS. 79 as a demagogue to whom power would necessarily fall, and not a few who were nationalists had genuine fears of a hobgoblin which they called Popery. There were besides the truculent, the foolish and the greedy, who see no duty beyond that of resisting any change in a system which is profitable to themselves. As this state of the country was the product of law and policy, long employed to produce such a result,* it will be scarcel} 7 " possible to comprehend the task these writers undertook, or the agencies proper to accomplish it, without a rapid glance at the causes from which the condition sprang. " To-day," says the proverb, " is the child of yesterday," and the Irishman of 1842, with whom we have to deal, was peculiarly the creation of remote causes and antecedent forces. Neither can the teachers themselves be understood except on the same terms. That a group of men, not deficient in capacity or judgment, persuaded themselves that Ireland ought to break away from the Union at any cost, and won an extraordinary ascendancy over the public mind on the strength of this belief, will be a puzzle to Englishmen till they have obtained some knowledge of the main facts of Irish history. * " I Lave no donbt that a peasantry of Protestant Germans might, if properly oppressed and brutalised, be made as bad as the Irish." " Sir George Cornewall Lewis's Letters." 80 YOUNG IRELAND. NOTE ON CHAPTER III. THE PROSPECTUS OF THE " NATION." On Saturday the 15th of October, 1842, will be published the first number of a DUBLIN WEEKLY JOURNAL, TO BE CALLED THE NATION. For which the services of the most eminent political writers in the country have been secured. IT WILL BE EDITED BY CHARLES GAVAN DUFFY, late Editor of the Vindicator. Aided by the following contributors : THOMAS OSBORNE DAVIS, Barrister-at-law ; W. J. O'NEILL DAUNT ; J. C. O'CALLAGHAN, Author of the " GREEN BOOK ; " JOHN B. DILLON, Barrister-at-law; CLARENCE MANGAN, Author of "Anthologia Germanica," " Litene Orientnles," &c. ; The LATE EDITOR of the LONDON MAGAZINE and CHARIVARI ; * A LATE EDITOR of the "TRUE SUN;" And others whose names we are not at liberty to publish. The projectors of the NATION have been told that there is no room in Ireland for another Liberal Journal ; but they think differently. They believe that since the success of the long and gallant struggle which our fathers maintained against sectarian ascendancy, a NEW MIND has grown up amongst us, which longs to redress other wrongs and achieve other victories; and that this mind has found no adequate expression in the Press. The Liberal Journals of Ireland were perhaps never more ably con- ducted than at this moment; but their tone and spirit are not of the present, but the past ; their energies are shackled by old habits, old pre- judices, and old divisions ; and they do not and cannot keep in the van of the advancing people. The necessities of the country seem to demand a journal able to aid and organize the new movements going on amongst us ; to make their frowth deeper and their fruit more *' racy of the soil;" and above all, to irect the popular mind and the sympathies of educated men of all parties to the great end of Nationality. Such a journal should be free from the quarrels, the interests, the wrongs, and even the gratitude of the past. It should be free to apply its strength where it deems best ; free to praise ; free to censure ; unshackled by sect or party. Holding these views the projectors of the NATION cannot think that a journal prepared to undertake this work will be deemed superfluous ; and as they labour not for themselves, but for their country, they are prepared, if they do not find a way open, to try if they cannot make one. Nationality is their first great object a Nationality which will not only raise our people from their poverty, by securing to them the blessings of a DOMESTIC LEGISLATION, but inflame and purify them with a lofty and heroic love of country, a Nationality of the spirit as well as the letter a Nationality which may come to be stamped upon our manners, our literature, and our deeds, a Nationality which may embrace Protestant, Catholic, and Dissenter, Milesian and Cromwellian, the Irishman of a hundred generations and the stranger who is within our gates ; not a Nationality which would prelude civil war, but which would establish internal union and external independence ; a Nationality which would be recognised by the world, and sanctified by wisdom, virtue, and prudence. * The London Magazine and Charivari preceded Punch. It was illustrated by John Leech, and edited by T. M. Hughes, correspondent of the Tiroes in Madrid, and author of " Revelations of Spain," "The Ocean Flower," " Irish Stew," &c. The late Editor of the True Sun was Mr. J. C. Fitzgerald, who did not prove to be of much value. CHAPTER IV. A BIRD'S-EYE VIEW OF IRISH HISTORY. MANY men refrain from reading Irish history as sensitive and selfish persons refrain from witnessing human suffering-. But it is a branch of knowledge as indispensable to the British statesman or publicist as morbid anatomy to the surgeon. To prescribe remedies without studying the seat of the disease, and the habits of the patient, is empiricism and quackery. In the rapid survey I propose to make I will omit what- ever can be omitted without loss, and touch only on events the consequences of which were still traceable in the habits and character of the people in the middle of the nineteenth century. The aboriginal inhabitants, like the Ancient Britons across the neighbouring channel, or the Gauls on the nearest main- land, were conquered at an early period by a people who identified themselves so completely with their new possessions, that they have come to be regarded as the type of the native race. It was fourteen centuries before Christ that an expe- dition of Celts from Spain, led by a chief whose name in its Latinised form is Milesius, landed on the island, and after some fierce fighting obtained complete possession of it. They were the Normans of that era, these Milesians, better armed and trained than the natives; disciplined in a higher civilisation, and politic enough to desire not to destroy but to absorb the conquered people. After the conquest the country (according to Celtic traditions) was divided between Heber and Heremon, sons of Milesius, to one or other of whom all the native families of G 82 YOUNG IRELAND. ancient blood delight to trace their pedigree ; and to this day the favourite name for an Irishman in poetry and romance is a Milesian. There were protracted and merciless feuds among the Milesian chiefs and their successors for many generations, feuds such as, nearly two thousand years later, desolated England in the Wars of the Roses. But the annals of every people with patriarchal customs and institutions begin in the same way. They feel unlimited devotion to the sept or tribe, and only a wavering loyalty to the union of tribes called the realm ; they ravage and massacre in the name of the chief who has suffered some indignity from a rival, and answer coldly to the call of a king who is enforcing a national right, or resisting an invader. The Irish race first felt the contagion of a common purpose not in war, but in labours of devotion and charity. Lying on the extreme verge of Europe, the last land then known to the adventurous Scandinavian, and beyond which fable had scarcely projected its dreams, it was in the fifth century since the Redemption that Christianity reached them. Patricius, a Celt of Gaul it is said, carried into Erin as a slave by one of the Pagan kings, some of whom made military expeditions to North and South Britain, and even to the Alps and the Loire, became the Apostle of Ireland. Patrick escaped from bondage, was educated at Rome, but in mature manhood insisted on returning to the place of his bondage, to preach Christianity to a people who seem to have exercised over the imagination of the Apostle the same spell of sympathy which in later times subdued strangers of many nations. He was received with extraordinary favour, and before his death nearly the whole island had embraced Chris- tianity. In the succeeding century the Church which he planted became possessed by a passion which it has never entirely lost, the passion for missionary enterprise. Its Fathers projected the conversion of the fierce natives of the Continent to the new creed of humility and self-denial, and by the same humane agents which Patrick had employed in Ireland persuasion and prayer ; a task as generous as any of which history has preserved the record. A BIRD'S-EYE VIEW OF IRISH HISTORY. 83 In this epoch Ireland may be said to have been a Christian Greece, the nurse o science and civilisation. The Pagan annals of the country are overlaid by fable and extravagance, but the foundation of Oxford or the mission of St. Augustine does not lie more visibly within the boundaries of legitimate history than the Irish schools, which attracted students from Britain and Gaul, and sent out missionaries through the countries now known as Western Europe. Among the forests of Germany, on the desert shores of the Hebrides, in the camp of Alfred, at the court of Charlemagne, in the capital of the Christian world, where Michelet describes their eloquence as charming the court of the Emperor, there might be found the fervid preachers and subtle doctors of the Western Isle. It was then that the island won the title still fondly cherished, " insnla sanctorum." Writers who are little disposed to make any other concessions to Ireland admit that this was a period of extraordinary intel- lectual activity, and of memorable services to civilisation. The arts, as far as they were the handmaidens of religion, attained a surprising development. The illuminated copies of the Scrip- ture, the croziers and chalices which have come down to us from those days, the Celtic crosses and Celtic harps, are witnesses of a distinct and remarkable national culture. The people were still partly shepherds and husbandmen, partly soldiers, ruled by the Chief, the Brehon, and the Priest. Modern philosophers who deplore their fate would find it hard to discover any period, before or since, when they were so prosperous and happy. After this generous work had obtained a remarkable ^access, it was disturbed by contests with the Sea Kings, who established settlements on the eastern coast of the island, which interrupted communication with Britain and Gaul. These new-comers burned monasteries, sacked churches, murdered women and priests, and, let it be admitted, built towns on the sea-coast. Before the dangers and troubles of a lon education, national defences, and the subsidies to religious denominations. Looking back now with a knowledge of subsequent events it is difficult to doubt, that if the Repeal Asso- ciation had retreated on Federalism it would have com- mitted suicide. The most capable and public-spirited members would have left it, as they did subsequently L L 578 YOUNG IRELAND. leave it in 1846; the sympathy of foreign countries would have been withdrawn from a people so fickle in their aims ; and at the same time the original Federalists who naturally desired to retain the control of their own cause, would have held aloof; the Association would have dwindled into the condition of the nameless and forgotten societies which had preceded it, and the national movement would have ended in '44 as it ended ten years earlier. I had returned to the Nation office from the Munster tour before this event, but my colleagues had scattered on similar excursions. Davis to the North, Dillon to the West, Barry and Lane to Cork, MacNevin to Grort and others elsewhere. There were none of them in the , Association when the letter was read, and there were none of them in the Nation office when the letter came to be reviewed. I had to act without the benefit of their advice, or to take the responsibility of maintaining silence before so cardinal an event. None of us dis- trusted the Federalists, on the contrary we had close friends among them, and watched their progress with constant interest. Davis had defeated an attempt to exclude them from Parliament as Anti-Repealers, we were in habitual communication with the chief Federa- lists in Dublin and Belfast, and they had been treated nowhere with more respect than in the Nation. But we were all persuaded, and I who knew them of old felt certain, that Mr. Crawford or Mr. Eoss would never act with O'Connell, that Mr. Wyse or Colonel Caulfield would probably never act with him, and that if he THE FEDERAL CONTROVERSY. 579 attempted to force a junction the result would be alienation and hostility.* The duty of the Nation under the circumstances seemed clear to me. At any risk it must hoist the danger signal. Otherwise not only the present fortune of the public cause but its prospects in the coming time might be wrecked. The writers in the Nation had won the confidence of their own generation to an unexampled degree ; if they forfeited it by any want of courage or independence the effect on the character of the genera- tion would be disastrous. The best recruits who joined * The friendly relations between the Federalists and the Young Irelanders is illustrated by the fact that when they rneditated establishing an organ, to teach their opinions to the country, they sought practical advice at the Nation office, and Davis was authorised to find them an editor. He pressed the office persistently on Maddyn, but without success. In March he wrote : " Now to your letter. I never asked you to join the party I am immediately connected with, for I supposed you alien from its opinions. What strength and pleasure I should receive from working by your side I need not tell you. The party who would sustain the Review are Federalists men thoroughly national in feeling, Catholic in taste, and moderate in politics. Things have come to that pass that we must be disgraced and defeated, or we must separate by force, or we must have a Federal Government. Mere Repeal is raw and popular. The Federalists include all who were Whigs in Belfast, the best of your Cork men Wyse, Caulfield, and several excellent men through the country. Hudson, McCullagh, Deasy, Wallis, and all that set are" Federalist. I will not ask you to come until matters are fixed and safe and clear ; all I wished now was to know, might you come ? You would make a great, a perfect editor. I'm glad you've given up the bar ; you're too good for a woolsack. . . . We must parochialise the people by property and institutions, and idealize and soften them by music, history, ballads, art, and games. That is, if we succeed, and are not hanged instead; but 1 know my principles will succeed." And again in June, when the project of a newspaper was substituted for that of a review : " But the whole project depends on getting as editor a man to whose honour patriotism, taste, education, and genius the proprietors could commit the whole affair. I do not think there is anyone here or in London tit for it but yourself. It would give you the Opportunity I know you always desired of raising the moral and intellectual character of your country. Your income would certainly be good, and would increase. The men you would have to deal with all you could wish. Your position quite independent alike of Castle or Concilia- tion Hall." L L 2 580 YOUNQ IRELAND. the Association had joined it because they believed there were now men in its ranks who would resist any arbi- trary stroke of authority even from O'Connell. They would not long 1 remain if this belief were destroyed. The Protestants of the middle classes who still held aloof justified themselves on the ground that to join O'Gonnell was to abandon all individual discretion, and the Unionists had jeeringly warned the young men, from time to time, that they were the marionettes of a showman who when it suited his purpose would ring the bell and announce that the performance was at an end.* It was about to be seen whether this description was just either to him or to them. With respect to the people, the duty of the Nation was still clearer. The aim of the journal had been to so educate and discipline them, that it would be impossible to retain them in sub- jection to England ; but if they were passive in the hands of their leaders they would never be formidable before their enemies. Liberty does not reside in institutions but in habits of thought and action ; nor is there any mode of winning it compatible with retaining in pupi- lage the nation who are to be liberated. In truth at this time the Irish people were far from being passive ; how far was exhibited significantly two or three years later. They were eager that the movement should be kept in the right path, but unwilling that O'Connell's authority should be rudely questioned even when they believed him to be in the wrong. It might be' said of the masses of the people, and said with equal truth of * Voice of the Nation, p. 35. THE FEDERAL CONTROVERSY. 581 the cabinet of the movement, that they often desired a change of policy but never a change of leaders. My only difficulty was consideration for my col- leagues. The Nation habitually spoke in behalf of men who had refrained from direct controversy with O'Connell whenever it was practicable, and I was unwilling to commit them, even in this serious con- tingency, to a conflict which they might still see some honourable method of avoiding. But after all the responsibility lay mainly with me ; for if O'Connell could ruin the Nation for resisting his new policy, I would be the chief sufferer. I determined therefore after anxious reflection to address a remonstrance to him in my own name, printed in the place ordinarily occupied by the chief leading article, but practically speaking only for myself. As it produced important results it will be necessary to give some extracts from this document: After excusing myself for addressing him in a public letter because I was no longer a member of the Association where the subject ought properly to be debated, and because a letter seemed a more friendly and respectful method of remonstrance than a leading article, I proceeded to combat his proposition that Federalism was better than Repeal as a national set- tlement and contended that it was not better but worse : ( ' In the first place the Imperial Representation on which it is based is calculated to perpetuate our moral and intellectual subjection to England. It will teach the aristocracy still to 582 YOUNG IRELAND. turn their eyes to London as the scene of their ambition. It- will continue to train them in English manners feelings and prejudices ; and establish permanently a centre of action apart from their native country. By the same process it will plant deeper the evil of absenteeism. It will compel Lords and Commons to reside out of the country, and continue the drain upon our resources in which you found so strong an argument for Repeal. In this respect it is I think a worse cure for absenteeism than Dr. MaunselFs Teetotum Parliament/' A share in the control of the Empire I contended was an inadequate compensation for accepting an Irish legislature with shorn authority, for our minority in the Imperial Parliament would be as powerless here- after as it was powerless at present, to accomplish the wishes of the people. It was moreover a settlement not less difficult to obtain ; for while Eepeal only contem- plated the restoration of a Constitution which formerly existed in Ireland, Federalism raised a new and serious difficulty by necessitating a reconstruction of the empire on a new basis, with local legislatures in each of the three kingdoms. I then urged, as courteously as I could, the delicate objection that Federalism whatever were its merits would not be promoted by his adopting it. "Federalism has undoubtedly the advantage of Repeal in one point; it is less hated. Unionists have not been trained to regard it as a raw head and bloody bones. They look upon it with comparative calmness and are certainly more likely to become reconciled to it than to Repeal. But it would not be in a better, but in a worse, condition for effecting this purpose if the national party adopted it to a man. The Lords THE FEDERAL CONTROVERSY. 583 used to think it an excellent reason for rejecting measures, that they were countenanced by O'Connell ; and I fear party pre- judice at home would treat Federalism in the same way. To be misunderstood and misrepresented is the progressive tax upon greatness, and since you are a millionaire you cannot complain of paying in proportion." I warned him that even if Federalism were de- sirable the way to create a party for it was not by identifying it with Repeal. The men mooting the question were men who always kept a day's march behind the people. If he had begun three years before by asking Federalism they would be now speculating on "justice to Ireland " and the restoration of the Whigs ; and if ever he fell back on their ground he would inevitably find it deserted ; Federalism was the shadow of Repeal, he could not get nearer to it or farther from it. In conclusion I intimated in studiously courteous language that his unexpected change of opinion did not involve, and must not be supposed to involve, any corresponding change in the opinions of the National party. " I do not gather from your letter that if you settled down into a preference for Federalism, you contemplate proposing the adoption of that principle by the Association. I earnestly hope you do not. Either the adoption or rejection of it would be an evil ; the rejection as a breach of discipline towards the leader of the movement ; the adoption on many serious grounds. The overwhelming majority of the members joined as Repealers ; it would be all but impossible to collect their individual suffrages on the proposed change, and no chance meeting at Conciliation Hall would be entitled to alter the fundamental 584 YOUNG IRELAND. principle upon which the body was organised and supported. The Committee of the Association is no more entitled to abrogate its constitution, than the Irish Parliament was to surrender its own functions. The great constituency outside in both cases is the body in whom the power resides. Such a change would fatally weaken the moral weight of the Association. In an individual a deliberate preference of a new opinion over an old one may argue candour and courage; in a nation it is generally a sign of weakness, and in our case surrounded by enemies at home and abroad,, it is sure to receive the worst interpretation." A shrewd critic at the time summarised my re- monstrance in a single sentence. " Your proposal, if it be not checked, will ruin Federalism, and ruin Repeal ; and though you are the leader you shall not lead us to destruction." The letter was universally reproduced and com- mented upon by the press. O'Connell occupied a position in which he was sure to find writers to justify him however flat a contradiction existed between his opinions to-day and his opinions yesterday ; but it is creditable to the bulk of the Eepeal journals that the prestige of his name, and the long and wholesome habit of awaiting his counsel, did not prevent them from declaring their dissent with sufficient plainness. They were divided between surprise that after nearly half a century's familiarity with the question he should still be in doubt upon the character and powers of the legislature he desired to establish, and a tacit convic- tion that he must have some worthy, though unknown and incomprehensible, motive for the course he adopted. THE FEDERAL CONTROVERSY. 585 Nearly half of the leading journals declared or implied that they were not ready to welcome the projected change ; a few pronounced it to be the height of wisdom, and the rest proposed to wait for further developments, which from the sagacity and experience of O'Connell they did not doubt would justify his course. Only one writer complained that I had sub- mitted the question to public scrutiny. The Pilot could not conceive why a journalist need trouble himself with fantastic notions and crotchety objec- tions when the leader had spoken ; if any publicist took so unwarrantable a course it must it was manifest to Mr. Barrett be for some unworthy motive.* The Whig and Tory press in Ireland pounced upon O'Connell's confession with shrieks of exultation. The latter saw in it the disruption of the National party ; the former the beginning of an alliance between the Repealers and the Whigs. There was an end, the ministerial journals declared, of Repeal. Federalism was the device of a defeated demagogue to escape from an untenable position. It was the first symptom of a foul compact with the Parliamentary Opposition to displace the Government and barter Irish votes anew for concessions and . patronage. They quoted his declaration at Tara in August '43 that twelve months would not pass before an Irish Parliament was sitting in College Green, and his announcement before entering * A precis of the opinions of journals which spoke with some special authority or responsibility on the question at issue, will help to realise the state of mind in which the controversy found the country ; and such a precis will be found in a note at the end of the chapter. 586 YOUNG IRELAND. Richmond that it would come in six months if peace were preserved, and scornfully demanded where was his Parliament now that the promised time had arrived ? They reminded the Nation that no newspaper on the popular side had opposed him and lived, and they predicted that he would first destroy the men who were in earnest, and then make over the debris of the Repeal party to the Whigs. The tone of the Whig journals was calculated to strengthen the suspicion which the Tories sought to sow. The Evening Post was then edited by a man who had apparently been a serviceable ally of O'Connell in the Catholic Association, but had passed over to the Whigs when they came into power in 1830, and openly occupied the position he had long secretly held, of a, stipendiary writer for the Castle.* He had assailed O'Connell with the foulest ribaldry during the first Repeal Agitation. " Paid Patriot " " Big beggarman " and a host of similar amenities were of his invention ; and it was well understood that his journal existed on the secret service money with which it was fed when his patrons were in power. This gentleman was enthusiastic for O'Connell' s new proposal, and indignant that it should be subjected to criticism. He demanded tri- umphantly whether if O'Connell asked the Association to substitute Federalism for Repeal Mr. Duffy contem- plated the possibility of its rejection. The Monitor also a Whig journal but understood to be free from official influence, and if controlled at all, to be only controlled * See McCarthy's Early Days of Shelley. THE FEDERAL CONTROVERSY. 587 by Mr. Purcell, aimed to become the organ of Federalism and treated O'Connell's advance towards that safe and practical doctrine as a new point of departure in Irish politics. The bulk of the "Whigs held the same lan- guage. Mr. Crawford and his associates desired a Federal Union because it embodied their idea of a permanent connexion between England and Ireland. But as always happens in political parties, there were others who desired that Federalism should be proposed whatever might finally become of it, because it was a party convenience at the hour. In truth it was a question of political existence with the Irish Whigs. A general election was expected ; and if they faced a general election without coming to an understanding with the National party it might be doubted whether a single Whig would remain in Parliament for an Irish constituency. But this was far from being their only motive. Living under the influence of Irish opinion, which they could not avoid sharing, familiar with the contemptuous and empirical treatment of Irish questions in Parliament, they longed for some arrangement which would satisfy their conscience and honour as Irish gentlemen, without forfeiting their party relations at head quarters. The Whig leaders in England, who have been charged with secretly abetting the hopes of the Federal party, gave no colour for this belief by the tone of their party organs. They not merely repu- diated the policy of the Irish section, but mercilessly unveiled its motives. The Morning Chronicle declared 588 YOUNG IRELAND. that no sensible observer of Irish politics would be more taken in by the delusion of Federalism than by the defiance of Repeal; but with a view to a general election, an agitation for electoral purposes might be carried on with greater effect than in the name of Repeal, especially if any Liberals of weight could be induced to head it. Mr. O'Connell was a more safe and more liberal guide than Mr. Duffy ; but much good would ensue from the discussion of Federalism which could not fail to show the evil and absurd results not only of that theory but of Repeal.* The Whig journals in Ulster sided with the English rather than the Irish leaders. They lent no aid to the federal movement although it was known that a private conference was being held in Belfast at that time between Mr. Crawford and some of his political friends to launch the question. The Northern Whig was neither for Repeal nor Federalism, but a public mind was the great want of Ireland, and the inde- pendence exhibited in the manifesto of the Young Ireland party in the Nation was therefore a subject of no ordinary satisfaction. The Banner of Ulster, organ of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church, was persuaded that Mr. O'Connell would carry the Association to any course which he might suggest, and that the Young Irelanders could offer no effectual resistance. * The Globe took a similar ground ; and the Sun was by no means sorry to see the Irish mind beginning to be divided between the visionary schemes of Federalism and total Repeal, for by such division the agitation would be greatly weakened and the question cease to wear the alarming aspect which it bore through the year of the monster meetings. THE FEDERAL CONTROVERSY. 589 The controversy was taken up by the French press. Le National, as might be expected, was in- dignant at any backward movement ; but even the cautious Journal des Debats declared that O'Connell's letter was the funeral oration of Repeal. The con- troversy also extended to America but before the American journals reached Ireland, the question was disposed of in an unexpected manner. While this controversy raged in the press, an absolute silence on the subject was maintained in the Association, where the public business was managed by Maurice O'Connell in the absence of his father and Smith O'Brien. I thought it prudent in the interest of the national cause, and courteous towards O'Connell, to ex- hibit a similar reticence in the Nation till the question had ripened for some decision. For two numbers which in the feverish state of the public mind covered a period that seemed interminable, the question was not revived except by copying the comments of leading journals on both sides of the controversy. In the meantime most of my colleagues had returned to town and unanimously approved of the course I had taken. * Tory journals in * It is probable that Davis would have confined himself to private remonstrance ; but when the resistance was publicly made he triumphed in its success. On reading O'Connell's letter he wrote to O'Brien from the North, where he was at the moment " O'Connell's letter is very able of its kind but it is bad policy if not worse, to suddenly read his recantation. He insulted the Federalists, then patronised them, then refused to tolerate them in Parliament unless they joined the Association, and now he dis- covers they are right all out, and of course were right all through. My opinion is, you know, what I have always avowed in the Nation namely that Federalism is not and cannot be a final settlement though it deserves a fair trial and perfect toleration. I believe there would be no limit to our nationality in twenty years whether we pass through Federalism or [a blank in the original letter] I write by this post to 590 YOrXG IRELAXD. Ireland, and Chartist journals in England, conducted by men who hated O'Connell with personal malignity, shrieked that the Nation was dumb, that it was cowed, that O'Connell had threatened it with extinction and privately whipped it into submission. It was not neces- sary to notice these pleasant inventions, but when the Pilot, so long the personal organ of Mr. O'Connell, chuckled over some insinuation of the same character, the time to speak had come. The next Nation contained two articles on the state of public affairs. In one of them Davis said : But then O'Connell is a Federalist ! Well if he be, as his letter seems to say, what reason is that for discouragement ? Ire- John O'Connell urging his father not to repeat his opinions at least till Federalists do something" (Cahermoyle Correspondence). Barry who had great authority on practical questions wrote his immediate assent to the course taken. " I was greatly gratified at the stand made by you against Federalism in the Nation ... I have of late been considering in every way the project of a Federal Union and I conceive it to be an entire and absolute delusion. Assume for a moment the possibility of England consenting to so revolutionary a change in her whole constitu- tion as it presupposes, the Imperial Congress, which must still be the body possessing all the real power of Government in its hands, would be constituted precisely as the Parliament now is. that is to say with a British (English and Scotch) majority, having interests pretty nearly in common and diametrically opposed to ours, ready and able to outvote us on every question of importance. Besides the possibility of severing (without mischief) our internal and external concerns is quite ridiculous. It is like telling a man that he shall have absolute control over the affairs of his stomach while you decide the quality and quantity of food and medicine which is to be admitted to his moxith and the exact amount and description of exercise which you will allow his legs and arms .... By the way I am delighted with the latter part of your letter, your suggestion that the Association may reject the proposition if laid before it for adoption, that the great leader may not find it a mere machine to turn to whatever purpose may suit his notion at the moment. One thing I am resolved on, that is, that if the Association passes any vote changing its character to a Federalist body I will at once resign as a member of it and wait till better and more honest men arise in the country to seek Repeal or something more, in a more independent fashion. M. J. BAKEY, Cork, 23 October 1844." THE FEDERAL CONTROVERSY. 591 land is for Repeal ; the Association is and will remain the Repeal Association ; and if the people go on organising and educating they can carry Repeal. The Federalists have put out no plan . . . . it is doubtful if they will. They are amiable and able men but they are agreed on nothing. Some are for a House of Peers some against it, some, whom O'Connell per- haps was thinking of, would make the Irish Parliament supreme in purely Irish affairs; many of them would deprive it of all commercial ecclesiastical and constitutional power : most pro- bably they will do nothing. The aspiration of Ireland is for unbounded nationality. To the policy of this we are sure O'Connell will return. God grant that he soon may. The destiny of Ireland with her sea frontier, her rich soil, her military formation, her more than " two millions of fighting men " is for no qualified freedom. In the other article I answered briefly some criti- cisms on my letter, and with respect to the imputed motive of the silence maintained in the Nation for the previous fortnight I said : "The legitimate leader of the movement was not more willing to lead than we to follow : we proclaimed strict obedience and discipline as essential to success and we practised them ; for where there are many captains the ship sinks. But at all times, and now not less than any other time, we stood prepared to hold our own opinion against him upon a vital question (such as the present) as freely as against the meanest man of the party. We do not run all risks with a hostile Government in proclaiming day by day weighty and dangerous truths, to abandon the same right under any other apprehension. O'Connell is incapable of playing the tyrant in the fashion these gentlemen suppose, and if he were not, we are incapable of sub- mitting to tyranny. Let it be understood then that our opinions are unchanged ; and unchangeable for personal motives, or under personal influence." 592 YOUNG IRELAND. One member * required to have liis name withdrawn from the Association ; he could not he said, hope to stem the current of public opinion guided by Mr. O'Connell but remembering how fatally a compromise on the tithe question had paralysed public opinion he would not by remaining lend any countenance to a new compromise. One seceder was not much ; but it might be that he was only the first ; in the Alpine regions the fall of a fragment of frozen snow no bigger than a bullet threatens an avalanche. In the following week the silence of the Association was broken by letters from Smith O'Brien and O'Connell. O'Brien w r ho had scrupulously withheld himself from all party relations and preached forbearance and conciliation on all sides, avowed his personal preference for Repeal as more easily attainable, and more useful when attained than any Federal constitution which could be devised. But he was not prepared to reject any plan for repeal- ing the Union which should appear to be more practicable, and more satisfactory to all who might fairly claim, to be parties to the adjustment of the question. O'Connell's letter took a shape which gave his enemies an excuse for bantering him which they were not slow to use. The remonstrance in the Nation had been the subject of comment in nearly every journal of political importance in the three kingdoms ; but none of these comments apparently attracted his notice. * Mr. Lawless, solicitor, the same who afterwards represented the political prisoners in the State Trials of 1866. THE FEDERAL CONTROVERSY. 593 His letter was addressed to the local paper published in his county town, and on its objections his attention was concentrated. The editor of the Kerry Examiner had misapprehended the precise nature of the Constitution of Eighty-two, and O'Connell read him a lecture on the danger of treating of subjects on which he was im- perfectly informed. The occasion however enabled him to offer some general observations to the country which were well timed. " I have read, (he said) your article headed Federalism and I feel very much obliged to you for the civil and kind things which you have said of me in that article. To be sure I have been working for upwards of forty years in the popular cause, and though I have often opposed the popular sentiment for a time, one way or the other the people have come round to my opinion, and such temporary disagreement has only tended to augment the public confidence. If there be any difference of opinion between me and the people at large on the present occasion, which , I am not disposed to believe yet the time is not come when any explanations can be given or any received, for this simple reason that up to the present moment there is no plan of Federalism before the public/' It was for the " federative plan " he had expressed the preference out of which the controversy arose ; and if it was sufficiently developed to be approved of, it might be assumed that it was sufficiently developed to be disapproved of. But the last sentence of his letter gave so much satisfaction that all disposition to criticise its details was lost. " Whatever (he said) shall be the result (of an investigation of the Federal plan when proposed) you may easily venture to believe that I for M M 594 YO'UNG IRELAND. one will never consent to receive less for Ireland than she had before. I am ready to accept as much more for her as I can possibly get." The writers of the Nation who hated dissension as the worst evil short of dishonour, promptly accepted this declaration as putting an end to all differences. Federalism was all along " an open question " and so let it remain ; but the object of the Association was the re-establishment of the Constitution of '82. "We shall Davis said rejoice at the progress of the Federalists because they advocate national principles and local government. Compared with Unionists they deserve our warm support ; but not an inch farther shall we go ; principle and policy alike forbid it. Let who will taunt or succumb, we hold our course. No anti Irish organ shall stimulate us into a quarrel with any national party; no popular man or influence shall carry us into a compromise. Let the Federalists be an independent and respected party; the Repealers an unbroken league our stand is with the latter/' * * I find by a letter in the Davis Papers, that I had to go to London to keep a term as a Law Student at this date, and thus the controversy which I opened was taken up by Davis. Before starting I wrote to him. " Dillon and J. U'H. have been here to counsel two things, the suppression of MacNevin's letter [on Young Ireland] as a pamphlet, and the receiving of O'Connell's last letter as a full declaration for Repeal, as the Freeman has done. Dillon who is anxious, will speak to you about this himself. I am inclined to agree with him All we can hope from O'Counell is a practical return to Repeal, a verbal confession of error is out of the question. Dillon justly argues, that if we treat him captiously, we will have no sympathy from the people, who want to see him right, but don't want to see him scolded. ... I wrote to MacNevin to suppress his pamphlet, if it be printed, and that I would pay any expense incurred. You ought to see that he does this for prudence sake. ... I don't think it would be wise to make the letter the subject of the leading article, it would be helping to cut off his retreat which is not our object. Treat him to a brevier sub-leader. I send you some materials for ' Answers ' and 1 sent several to the printer. I sent also poetry enough for the number and Dr. Madden's sketch for a literary leader. Pray read the proofs. I will finish " Tow row row" on my way to London, as so popular an air ought not to be missing." Davis Papers. Dutt'y to Davis. THE FEDERAL CONTROVERSY. 59 "> Meanwhile the Federalists showed no disposition to accept O'Connell's overtures. Mr. Crawford in a con- fidential and affectionate letter to O'Brien passed the harshest judgment on them. " He wants " he said re- ferring to a former transaction "he wants to take the same undignified course, humbugging both Repealers and Federalists ; trying to make the Repealers believe they are Federalists and the Federalists that they are Re- pealers, and keeping a delusive joint agitation, knowing right well that whenever particulars came to be dis- cussed they would split up like a rope of sand. I conceive that the principles of '82 and those of a Federal constitution are so essentially different that it is impossible for the supporters of each to work together, unless one gives way to the other."* But Mr. Crawford did not confine himself to the confidential expression of his dissatisfaction ; in a series of letters describing his plan of a Federal Union he permitted himself to be drawn aside by the taunts of Tory journals that he was playing the game of a man whom he had recently condemned. " It was true " he said " that he had condemned the course taken in the Tithe question and he should still condemn it. He considered the junction of Mr. O'Connell and some of the Irish members under his influence with the Whigs on that occasion a stain on the records of Irish pro- ceedings." If sensible men are striving for a common end they dwell upon points of agreement, not on points of difference; but this indiscretion was what any one * Nov. 1844. Cahermoyle Correspondence. M M 2 596 YOUXG IRELAXD. who knew Sharman Crawford might have foreseen. The weak and strong parts of his character alike forbade any cordial union with O'Connell. He was proud, punctilious, and angular, unlikely to forget past af- fronts, and more solicitous to be conspicuously right than to be successful. O'Connell was not implacable and could even be magnanimous in personal contro- versy; but this maladroit revival of an old quarrel affronted him. In a letter to the Association he re- gretted that Mr. Crawford should as usual have gone out of his way to attack him, but he heartily forgave him and only lamented that the Federalism described in his letter should be so wholly worthless. " I may be greatly mistaken but as far as I can form a hasty opinion Mr. Crawford's plan seems to me to be an elaborate scheme to make matters worse than they are at present and to reduce Ireland from a nominal equality with England to a real and vexatious pro- vincial degradation." O'Connell's return from Darrynane was celebrated by public entertainments in Tipperary and Limerick to which I was invited; and Doheny who lived on the route was anxious on grounds of public policy that I should attend. " Will Duffy come down to our festival," he wrote to Davis, " I think he ought if it be at all possible. There is no doubt of there being sedulous attempts made to persuade the people that we are distrusted by O'Connell. I invited Dan here to dine and sleep, not without some hope that you and Duffy would be able to come to meet him. Could ye do so ? Besides the pleasure THE FEDERAL CONTROVERSY. 597 it would give myself, I am sure it would be useful to our friends and to the country. There seems to he a public estrangement between ourselves and O'Connell. But without reasoning the thing I am sure of its value. Say you'll come and let me hear where Duffy is ? 3> * Neither of us went, but Doheny reported that the Federal controversy had produced a fermentation of opinion in the district. Immediately after the Limerick dinner he wrote to me " Your name was received with the loudest cheers ; to such a degree indeed as, in my mind, to rouse the great mail's wrath. But although the reception was most nattering, still there is a very strong feeling that the Nation was wrong in intimating that Dan had abandoned the cause. To be sure most men who entertain that feeling have not inquired into the justice or the value of the argument in the Nation ; they content themselves with saying that it is necessary to preserve the inviolability of his character." On the 25th November O'Connell returned to the Association. His first task was to assert and justify himself. He replied to the critics who had discussed his Federal letter, passing lightly over the objections of Irish writers, but falling with intense bitterness on English and French journals. The Whigs were never he affirmed, so hated in Ireland as now, and the reason was to be found in the conduct of their newspapers. It was to be found in the solemn insolence of the Morning Chronicle, the slanderous mummery of the Examiner, and the stupidity of Lord Palmerston's paltry Globe, which turned the * Doheny to Davis. Cashel, Sept. 10, '45. 598 YOUNG IRELAND. just aspirations of the Irish people into unholy mockery. What was more ludicrous still was the manner in which the Tory Press blamed him for compi'omising the Repeal cause. " What a base man " they exclaimed " this must be to give up Repeal ! " Even the press of Louis Philippe took up the cry. Odillon Barretts National began ; but the Repealers were lovers of monarchical government and were Christians, two unpardonable offences in the eyes of the National. Thiers' paper the Con- stitution )i el joined the cry. Thiers published a history of the French Revolution in which he related the September massacres, where hundreds of Bishops and priests were murdered, in a style which made it plain that if he could he would enact that mas- sacre anew. He was glad to have the animosity of such a man. Next came the Journal des Debate which said, " Let not O'Connell and Ireland imagine that in case of a war with England they would get assistance from France. " He hurled his contempt on the paltry usurper Louis Philippe and his newspapers. He would not accept Repeal at the hands of France. Sooner than owe anything to France he would sur- render the cause of the country he loved best in the world. It was likely the National, the Constitutionnel and the Dcbats were not scoundrels for nothing. They gave money's worth to England, and they probably got money value in return. But though O'Connell reprimanded his critics he amended as far as was possible the blunders they had exposed. He broke decidedly and even rudely with the Federalists. After the liberation of the State Prisoners (he said) advances had been made to him by men of large influence and large property, who talked of seeking Repeal on what they called the Federal plan. He inquired what the Federal plan was, but nobody could tell him. He called upon them to propose their plan ; the view in his own mind being that Federalism could not commence till Ireland had a Parliament of her own, because she THE FEDERAL CONTROVERSY. 599 would not be on a footing with England till possessed of a Parliament to arrange her own terms. The Federalists were bound to declare their plan, and he had conjectured that there was something advantageous in it, but he did not go any further; he expressly said he would not bind himself to any plan. Yet a cry was raised, a shout was sent forth by men who doubtless thought themselves fitter to be leaders than he was, and several young gentlemen began to exclaim against him instead of reading his letter for explanation. It was not that they read his letter and made a mistake, but they made the mistake and did not read the letter. He had expected the assistance of the Federalists, and opened the door as wide as he could without letting out Irish liberty. But (he continued) let me tell you a secret, Fedei'alism is not worth that (snapping his fingers) . Federalists I am told are still talking and meeting much good may it do them, I wish them all manner of happiness ; but I don't expect any good from it. I saw a little trickery on the part of their aide-de-camp but I don't care for that, I have a great respect for them. I wish them well. Let them work as well as they can but they are none of my children, I have nothing to do with them/'' If the writers of the Nation desired controversy here was a tempting thesis. If they desired a personal triumph here was a signal victory. It might have been asked, If no one could tell him what their plan was, how he came to give the " Federative plan " a prefer- ence over simple Repeal, which he had been advocating for thirty years. It might have been easily shown that these young men, of whose rashness he complained, asked to have no more done than he himself now found it necessary to do, to satisfy public opinion. They asked even less, for they did not want to have the Federalists treated with levity or incivility. The sug- 600 YOUNG IRELAND. gestion that he expected the Union to be first repealed, and an Irish Parliament established, before Federalism came to be mooted between the countries was a text upon which they could have scarcely trusted themselves to write ; for it was cynical experiments like this which had reduced O'Connell's influence over the educated classes so low. But instead of having recourse to any of these themes they uttered no personal com- plaint and no note of triumph ; but urged the whole party on to a campaign of renewed hope and restored confidence.* Looking back at these events it cannot be con- cealed that O'Connell's treatment of the Federalists was a series of mistakes throughout. They were doing important work by leavening new classes with the national sentiment ; they should have been en- couraged, applauded and left unmolested. His proposal to unite with them and even to subordinate his opinions to theirs, was made without having taken the obvious precaution of ascertaining their wishes. Their aversion to such a union arose perhaps in some cases from personal feelings which were paltry enough, but in the main it sprung from the belief that the great tribune would frighten away the very recruits whom they hoped to win. Had he quietly withdrawn from his negotiations at this point the Federalists would still * The contest was celebrated by an H. B. caricature, the substitute in that day for Mr. Punch and his numerous family. It represented O'Connell dropping a poker inscribed Federalism, which had become suddenly red hot, by a touch from the sword of Harlequin, whose cap is made from a number of the Nation. TEE FEDERAL CONTROVERSY. 601 have done useful work for the national cause. But he withdrew in a tempest of wrath and scorn and from that hour the hope of assistance from the Northern Federalists was at an end. It is the task of men of genius to show a people its own wishes, often imper- fectly understood, and the way to realise them. The movements which have changed the fate of nations have always been the work of a man or of a few men in the first instance. But these men cannot undo their own work. Whenever they have attempted to do so they have fallen like Mirabeau and Dumourier. Hampden could not have turned back the people of England, nor Washington the people of America, nor Kosciusko the people of Poland, from the goal to which he was their leader, nor could O'Connell have turned back the people of Ireland. And we now know' beyond controversy what was little suspected at the time, that the plan he had under consideration was the meanest and feeblest form of Federalism anywhere seriously proposed. In a confidential letter to O'Brien full of exaggerated professions of confidence, which have borne the test of time but indifferently, he sent him the plan in question, and urged him on a variety of grounds to give it a favourable consideration. This letter was written a week after he had opened the subject to the Association, and a day or two after the newspaper containing my remonstrance had reached Darrynane. After a quarter of a century it has become historic, 602 YOUNG IRELAND and I leave it without comment to justify the alarm bell rung in the Nation* Simple persons have sometimes inquired in latter times, " Why did you reject Federalism ? Was not it better than nothing ? Wasn't it a good beginning of all you hoped to win?" No doubt; but what we rejected was not Federalism, which no one proffered, but the first step in a retreat upon a new Whig alliance. The combination O'Connell suggested was a moral impossibility. The very suggestion that he and the Repeal party would become Federalists gave Federalism a blow from which it never rallied. An eminent Whig barrister, now a judge, who was asked later, What has become of the Federal party? described their fate graphically and accurately. " O'Connell," he said, "jumped on board our boat and sunk it." The Federal episode thus ended, men became eager to hear what was to be done to carry forward the national cause. At the succeeding meeting of the Association f O'Connell spoke at great length but the only practical measures on which he touched were two originated by the General Committee while he was in prison. He recommended attention to the registry with a view to a general election, and the systematic extension of Eepeal Reading Rooms. It is impossible to doubt that at this time the luminous intellect, which for more than a generation had been like a lamp to * O'Conuell's letter to Smith O'Brien will be found in a note at the end of the chapter. t Repeal Association Dec. 2nd '44. THE FEDERAL CONTROVERSY. 603 guide the feet of his people, was clouded by disease. The time when he was resourceful and electric with ideas was quite gone. He took up lightly the sug- gestions of others and contributed none of his own. A week after he again spoke at great length retorting bitterly on the English newspapers which had assailed him for breaking with the Federalists, but making no reference to any policy for advancing the cause. Among the English journals his chief complaint was against the Examiner, then edited by Mr. Eonblanque, whom he charged in language of extravagant censure with being indifferent to truth when it served his purpose to lie. " The bribed wretch who made this truculent attack upon him complained forsooth of the violence of his language because he had called him a liar and a miscreant. Yet the scoundrel had neither proved his charge nor withdrawn it, when time for mature reflection had been granted him." These were not the opinions which any of his edu- cated audience entertained of Mr. Fonblanque or of the Erench journals. They did not believe them corrupt, nor has any fact ever appeared to justify such a suspi- cion. But it was not desirable to begin a new contro- versy, especially a controversy on a subject so far removed from the business of the Association. Contro- versy was sure to come without seeking it ; for invective so unmeasured against critics at a distance, accompanied by singular forbearance towards the critics at home who had begun the controversy, was not natural ; and no one of any foresight could doubt that their punishment was 604 YOUNG IRELAND. only postponed. One thing at any rate was now plain the opportunity afforded by the defeat of the Govern- ment on the writ of error was lost. We had won the battle but we had not known how to improve the victory. The precious opportunity which does not return was lost in a barren negotiation with suspicious allies. The movement began to lag, for the lassitude of a leader soon communicates itself to the cause. The English press exaggerated the check, and insisted that it amounted to a disaster. But the people of Ireland had not changed their mind. They were still resolved to obtain the control of their own affairs, and though they were distressed and perhaps dismayed, at the recent turn of events their determination to succeed in the end had not slackened. The Young Irelanders uttered no complaint, but applied themselves to make the best of existing circumstances. Whatever O'Connell might do, or leave undone, their duty was the same ; and some of them might hope to outlive him a quarter of a century. In the middle of November Davis wrote frankly in the Nation what was in the mind of his friends. " Disunion has ceased among your leaders let energy revive amongst you. The parties of England scoff at your complaints and jest at your sufferings. Poor millions of Irish ! half clad, half housed, half fed, England jests at you ; middle classes of Ireland ! men full of ambition and genius robbed of your com- mercial gains and your political rights, England spurns your prayer as the writhing of helpless worms. Are you helpless millions of Ireland ? Strong hands, brave hearts, growing minds, owners of the kingdom of Ireland are you poor imbeciles ? Have you blood and strength and manhood ? And if you have what THE FEDERAL CONTROVERSY. 605 will you do ? "Will you burst into an unskilled insurrection and feed your foes with your ruin ? Will you drop your heads and sob like overworked horses and let these despots drive you as they like? Will you take to the miserable resources of the drunken Ribbon Lodge or the blind fury of assassination ? We who are ready for anything so that it give good hope of your success, we answer for you ; we answer thus : We will teach and avow Repeal more openly and boldly than ever ; we will establish People's Courts, People's bands, People's Reading Rooms; we will be more earnest in conciliation, more tolerant to the errors of all who are for independence ; and now coming on this winter we pledge ourselves to each other and to the teeth of our tyrants that we will carry the Repeal organization into every parish and wait until our leaders tell us we are organized enough, united enough and educated enough, to use the first opportunity/' * The Federal movement languished under the hosti- lity of the Whig leaders and the controversy between Crawford and O'Connell. To Smith O'Brien who was at Cahermoyle Davis wrote at this time " All chance of a federal movement is gone at present, and mainly because of O'Connell's public and private letters ; yet I am still doing all in my power to procure it, for I wish to cover O'Connell's retreat. He is too closely bound up with Ireland for me ever to feel less than the deepest concern for his welfare and reputation."! * Nation, Nov. 16, 1844. f Cahermoyle Correspondence. 606 YOUNG IRELAND. NOTES ON CHAPTER III. THE FEDERAL CONTROVERSY. The tone of the leading Irish journals may be gathered from the sub- joined precis, and a knowledge of it will greatly help the reader to understand the composition and character of the national party at this time. The Freeman's Journal, then the only daily paper of the popular side, thought that the merit of Federalism was a question of degree. If the people of Ireland listened as a final settlement of their relations with England to the Federalism which some men talked, they would be justifying all the contempt and contumelious wrong that which connection had inflicted on them. But Federalism like Mr. Grey Porter's was worth considering. And O'Connell it might be assumed would not have distracted the people by a new controversy without some practical end in view. The Cork Examiner the leading national journal in Minister, gave forth an uncertain sound. It desired to be more clearly informed what was Federalism ? An Irish Parliament composed of the Lords Commons and legitimate monarch of Ireland was intelligible to all minds ; but the people did not understand the complicated idea of Federalism. What constituted the local affairs over which a Federal Legislature would have control. What did they include and what did they exclude. Mr. Duffy's letter had some forcible reasoning, but O'Conuell must not be embarrassed in the effort to benefit Ireland. The Belfast Vindicator the' organ of the Repealers of Ulster spoke more unreservedly. It could not deny that Mr. O'Connell's letter had caused some alarm among the ranks of men originally enlisted under the banner of definite principle, whose leading orator and statesmen and jour- nalists had been imprisoned for the assertion of a definite principle, namely the establishment of an independent Parliament in the kingdom of Ireland, free from the control or limitation of England. But people were more frightened than hurt. For the declaration of a preference for Federalism was Mr. O'Connell's individual preference which he was too wise and just to attempt to force on the Association. The General Committee or the Association itself had, as Mr. Duffy insisted, as little right to pledge the people to Federalism as the Irish Parliament had to betray the trust reposed in them. Among the Repeal papers in Leinster outside the capital the Kilkenny Journal held a leading place. Some of the most capable and experienced men of the national party were resident within the range of its circulation and in turn it was understood that it lay within the range of their influence. This journal was of opinion that it would be treason to the country and injustice to the country's leader not to declare that the people viewed Federalism with suspicion. They desired to maintain the Crown as the only bond of connection between Great Britain and Ireland. O'Connell had himself taught them this principle, and it was a work which could not be done and undone like Penelope's web. Mr. Duffy was right in declaring that a sudden change of policy however justifiable in an individual would argue fickleness, vacillation and want of purpose in a nation. The Limerick Reporter thought Federalism was good bad or indifferent according to the form in which it was proposed. Mr. Duffy thought THE FEDERAL CONTROVERSY. 607 Federalism did not go so far as Repeal, but it might go farther. If for example Ireland did not send an equal number of members with England to the Imperial Congress it would be a one sided and inadmissible system. The Tipperary Vindicator contended that the time when Federalists were admitted into the Association was the proper period to condemn Federalism, if it were a bad thing. At present it would be better to leave time to develop the views of the transcendently able leader than pronounce opinions one way or the other. The Newry "Examiner defended O'Connell from the imputation made by Tory journals that he struck the national ensign from the flagstaff, and was about to substitute some motley tricolor for the historic G-reeu. On the contrary he had merely intimated the courteous purpose of hearing what an important party had to propose. Mr. Duffy had asserted the right of free opinion in language sturdy enough, but never wanting in the respect due to O'Counell. There was one of his propositions from which it would be criminal to withhold immediate and cordial assent. It would be a fla- grant breach of faith with the nation to attempt to force Federal opinions upon the Association, or to pledge that body to anything but the general principle of Repeal. The Southern Reporter which was the organ of Federalism in Munster, applauded the frankness and manliness of the remonstrance, but considered that unlimited and implicit obedience to a single leader was the necessary condition of success in a national movement. The Kerry Examiner's share in the controversy was noted because it was the local newspaper of the county where O'Connell resided, and where he was supposed to be supreme. But this journal declared that Federalism was not to be preferred to Repeal. Fortunately however O'Connell had not declared an absolute, but only a conditional preference for the federal plan. The greatest Irish lawyers and statesmen had pronounced the Union to be a fraud by which Ireland had been robbed of her Parliament ; she demanded a restoration of it, but Federalism was not a restoration on the contrary it was an abandonment of that claim. Of the English journals which had advocated Repeal, the Tablet was the ablest and best informed, because Mr. Lucas did not give the question merely a casual attention, but brought the whole force of his subtle intellect to solve a great political problem. On this occasion he declared that he did not agree with all the objections taken by Mr. Duffy; but considered the general scope of his letter exceedingly sound and full of wisdom. Mr. Porter's scheme of Federalism would not find favour in England because no scheme for a reconstruction of the Empire would be supported there ; but if the Northern Protestants, who were then con- sidering the question proposed a reasonable and plausible arrangement it would have a better chance of success than simple Repeal. The Leeds Times did not regret the present controversy. Mr. Duffy's remonstrance marked an important era in the movement. It formed the commencement of a discussion of the means by which the liberty of the Irish people was to be gained. Hitherto the movement had been popular and impulsive ; it had now arrived at a stage when it must become reflective and legislative. The plan must be proposed, discussed, and decided upon by which Repeal was to be achieved and the Government of Ireland afterwards carried on. What were the constitutional means of dissolving the Union ? What was to be the subsequent constitution of Ireland? What authority was the English Queen or the English Minister 608 YOUNG IRELAND. to exercise over it ? How were taxes to be levied, armies to be raised and paid, treaties with foreign countries to be formed ? All these questions must be discussed and settled before a sufficient amount of moral force could be brought to bear on the British Parliament to compel them to repeal the Act of Union. O'CONNELL'S LETTER TO O'BRIEN ON THE FEDERAL PLAN. Darrynane Abbey, 21st Oct., 1844. MY DEAR O'BRIEN, It was only yesterday I received the paper of which you have enclosed a copy. It is the " first project " of the Federalists ; its history or its contents, are not to reach the press from us, nor is there to be any commentary in the papers until it has appeared authentically, as the act of subscribing Federalists. Subject to this caution I submit it with the least possible delay to you for consideration. The principal actor in Dublin in the arrangement is William Murphy called of " Smith- field." He is a man who has acquired enormous wealth and has long been a principal " brains carrier " of the Irish Whigs. A most shrewd sensible man, Thomas Hutton the very wealthy coachmaker, has assisted and is assisting. I could mention other influential highly influential men. There is to be a Federalist meeting at Belfast on the 26th. Caul- field brother of Lord Charlemont leads or presides. Sharman Crawford, Ross, the member for Belfast, and other notabilities attend. Hutton who is a Presbyterian goes there and passes through Armagh to muster as many important Presbyterians as he can, or at least to procure their signatures. O'Hagan the barrister attends the registry, and will be at the meeting on the 26th. I do not know whether it will be a public meeting but a publication will emanate from it. In short the movement is on foot. The effect must in any case as it strikes me, be useful. It annihilates mere Whiggery. I had nothing whatever to do directly or indirectly with the composi- tion or the material of this document. I was merely sent a copy of it by a third person so soon as it was put into publication ; and to you alone do I send a copy of it. I do not further adjudge its contents than considering them as a mere sketch. But this I say to you that your accession to the Repeal cause has been the efficient cause of this advance and I do not hesi- tate to say further and to pledf/e myself not to assent to any plan for the restoration of the Irish Parliament, or to any of the details of any such plan, that meets with your disapprobation. We go together ; that is you go with me because I certainly will not go a single step without you. No man living has been more fortunate than you in the opportunity of showing personal independence. Whatever you do will be the result of your own judgment, and differ with me who may I will not differ with you. If you were in my opinion so wrong as to violate principle I would retire ; I would cease to act, and would do so rather than join in any course I deemed un- just or injurious. But while I do act I will act with you. I am thoroughly convinced that without your accession to the Repeal cause years upon years would elapse before we made any impression upon the general Protestant mind. Ireland owes you an unlimited debt of gratitude and the popular confidence in you can never be shaken. Consider then the document I send you attentively. Be prepared for its authentic publication. You probably will not commit yourself respecting its contents without conference as well as mature consideration. It is but a skeleton and wants THE FEDERAL CONTROVERSY. 609 nerve and sinew and flesh. There is enough for conference and there are some promising limbs but there must be more before we can consent to give it vitality. I will not take one single step about it without giving you previous intimation and consulting with you fully and deliberately. Believe me to be respectfully and faithfully yours, W. S. O'Brien, M.P. DANIEL O'CoNNELL. It need only be noted that these professions of a determination to act together were made ten days after O'Connell had written his public letter, declaring a preference for Federalism, on which he had not consulted O'Brien. They were made, it will be admitted, several days after the Nation had opposed the scheme, when O'Brien's neutrality had become highly important. Extract from the Federal Project, enclosed in the foregoing letter. " While all matters of foreign, commercial, and ecclesiastical policy as well as the general taxation and expenditure of the United Kingdom would by such an arrangement remain as now, within the exclusive control of the Imperial Legislature, such matters as the regulation and disposition of local taxation, the relief of the poor, and the development of the natural resources of this country would be provided for by the local assembly which must necessarily be better qualified to discharge such functions. " We utterly disclaim any intention of rendering the proposed measures in any degree subservient to the severance of the legislative connection between Great Britain and Ireland, which thus reformed we shall deem it our duty as we believe it will be our interest by every means in our power to maintain." CHAPTER IV. RELIGIOUS INTRIGUES, AT HOME AND ABROAD. THE punishment of the Young Irelanders came in a shape no one had foreseen. Subsequent events show that at this time it was determined to render them odious to the people, and then drive them out of the Association. They were to be represented as "the secret enemies of the Church and the Liberator." Mr. John O'Connell was probably the author ; he was at any rate an active agent of this project. His father, who in feeble health and hopes had fallen under his influence, permitted, and in the end abetted, the scheme. What was best as well as what was worst in the nature of O'Connell was indeed easily enlisted in a design like this. He was above all things the Catholic champion, and an imputa- tion of secret hostility to the Church naturally called him to arms ; he was very jealous of his personal authority ; he had often encountered turbulent and envious spirits, during forty years of agitation, and sometimes found himself pressed hard by honest rivalry, and he was never scrupulous of the means to be employed in freeing himself of such embarrassment. With Mr. John O'Connell, who united a stealthy ambi- RELIGIOUS INTRIGUES, AT HOME AND ABROAD. 611 tion to a narrow intellect, the motive was different. He was " the Young Liberator," so his flatterers were accustomed to style him predestined to inherit the Tribune's wreath. The human mind is so prompt to deceive itself that it is impossible to affirm that he had no faith in the stories he propagated ; but I am per- suaded, from a close observation of his career, that his main motive was dislike of the brilliant young men whose gifts made his feebleness and mediocrity painfully conspicuous, and a conviction that he could not rule where they were his competitors. At a later period as we shall see his more generous brother pronounced that " John had done it all." Had they been assailed in the Association they were very certain to defend them- selves ; and the most distinguished of the recent recruits would have taken part with them. Had they been assailed for their real sin, the share they took in the recent controversy on Federalism, the bulk of the Association and the country had already arrayed them- selves on their side. But there were other methods by which they might be more securely and effectually attacked. Whispers began to circulate against them in various parts of the country at the same time, so uniform in their character as to bespeak a common origin. These young men, it was said, with sad shakes of the head, were unfortunately quite indifferent to religion ; nay more, they were the enemies of religion, and in fine, they wanted to introduce the licence of French principles into Irish politics. They were jealous of the Liberator; then, they were the enemies of the Liberator; N N 2 612 YOUNG IRELAND. and, after a while, they wanted to displace the Liberator and throw the country into confusion. It is often the curse of distinguished men to be surrounded by slaves and sycophants who exaggerate their prejudices, and this class was not wanting about O'Connell, who had lent his countenance to some of the least reputable men in Parliament and the press. To these men the unstained lives of the Young Irelanders were a constant reproach, and they took up the new device con amore. The staff of professional agitators, the veterans who were receiving salaries for nominal services, and the ill- used gentlemen whose sinecures had been threatened, swelled the chorus. The press threw out mysterious hints of danger. The honest Pilot was alarmed to think that there were persons, prominent in the national movement, whose religious opinions were not sound ; and various local Pilots echoed the warning. It is not wonderful that a serious impression was made upon many pious and upright men, especially among the senior clergy, by charges so skilfully and authorita- tively circulated. The main body of the young priests rejected them with scorn, and among laymen under thirty they had no partisans. The young men felt in the first instance a mixture of amazement and contempt. Davis was the person chiefly pointed at, and they refused to believe that doubts could arise in any honest mind respecting the intentions of one so transparently pure and upright, so free from all taint of finesse or double dealing, and whom they knew to be among the most unselfish of God's creatures. But RELIGIOUS INTRIGUES, AT HOME AND ABROAD. 613 Davis himself did not regard the danger lightly. At the beginning of the Federal Controversy a Professor of Maynooth, who certainly had no share in the con- spiracy, for he was open and bold and quite incapable of baseness of any sort, wrote a pseudonymous letter to one of the national journals* complaining of a dangerously loose and uncatholic tone in the writings of the Nation. In his case the alarm was honestly enter- tained, but it was founded on complete ignorance of the men, and was stimulated at the moment, half uncon- sciously, by criticisms on writings, in the Dublin Review, in which he took peculiar interest. I answered him in the same journal not unsuccessfully; and the controversy left us personal friends. He proved indeed in later difficulty and peril a friend worthy to have been won on a generous field of battle. Father Meehan, as one who shared our principles and aims and knew the men concerned, repudiated the charge publicly; and other young priests made light of it. But Davis feared the influence of such debates on the uneducated people, and in another sense on the educated class who still held aloof. He wrote to O'Brien indicating the danger and the remedy : " I entreat of you/' he said, " to write to O'Connell requiring some disavowal, or at least a stop to the bigoted attacks on the Nation. I wrote, that a man had as good a right to change from Catholicity to Protestantism, as from Protestantism to Catho- licity, and called the State Trial miracle ' mock' and censured * The Weekly Register (which had outlived the Morning Register, of which it was an off -shoot). He wrote under the signature of " An Irish Priest?." 614 YOUNG IRELAND. the Italian censorship. I shall do so again ; and I shall never act with a party that quarrels with such opinions. I will not be the conscious tool of bigots. I will not strive to beat down political, in order to set up religious, ascendency. You, unless I have much mistaken you, will subscribe to what I now say. The Federalist leaders here go entirely with me, and in fact now or never we Protestants must ascertain whether we are to have religious liberty. I have written to J. O'C. on this. My defence of D. O. Maddyn (Ireland and its Rulers, Part III.) against the Dublin Review seems to have called out this attack. Is this to be endured ? Is it even politic to endure it?"* On the same day he wrote to me on the same subject " I have written to J. O'Connell, O'Brien, &c. by this post, to stop the lies of the bigot journals. I have done so less even on account of the Nation (which can be steered out of the diffi- culty in three weeks without any concession) than to ascertain whether the lay Catholics can and will prevent bigots from interfering with religious liberty. If they cannot, or will not, I shall withdraw from politics; as I am determined not to be the tool of a Catholic ascendency, while apparently the enemy of British domination. Your Lawrence O'Toole is very strong and original though I am not quite reconciled to the metre yet. The last Nation is excellent, and is another proof that after March next you will be able to let me retreat for a year on my history [of Ireland] . I have given up verses since I left Dublin and feel as if I could not write them again ; so leave plenty [for publi- cation in the Nation] when you are going to London. I shall be up by the end of the week. Hudson and I took a sly trip through Monaghan, Leitrim, Hoscommon, &c. I am tolerably well in body and in good spirits ." * Dated Belfast, Oct. 27th, '44. Cahermoyle Correspondence. He had gone to Belfast -with Mr. Eliot Hudson to confer with the Northern Federalists. RELIGIOUS INTRIGUES, AT HOME AND ABROAD. 615 By this time the Federal controversy was at its height, and O'Connell was probably in no humour to reassure Davis. His answer to O'Brien's representa- tion was general and vague. The upshot of it was that no harm would be done to the public cause. "I do not believe," he wrote, " that there is the least danger of any bigotry tainting the Association. Not the least. I am thoroughly convinced that any sentiment of that kind would be scouted with unanimous execration." * Meanwhile warnings came from many quarters that the influence of the young men was being systematically undermined, and their speeches and writings misrepre- sented. In the beginning of November, Davis wrote to O'Brien sending him country journals in which the attack had been reiterated, and others in which it was rebutted. " All this might pass for newspaper hubbub to be frowned at and forgotten, tut I know that it is part of a system for stopping the growth of secular education and free discussion, and that it has been, and is again likely to be within this month, a subject of serious debate, whether the Nation and ( promiscuous education ' and independent lay opinion, should not be formally denounced by authority. I am not to a shilling's value pro- prietor of the Nation, and would be a much greater gainer by other literary pursuits, to say nothing of my profession, than writing for it, nor do I think its property would be much injured by such a denunciation were it met, as I trust it would be, with decent firmness and increased ability in the journal assailed. But I do fear that such an event would ruin Repeal. The Federalists to a man would stand by us in such a quarrel, and the desire now entertained by some of them to leave all ecclesi- * Cahermoyle Correspondence. 616 YOUXG IEELASD. astieal matters to an Imperial Parliament would become the fixed principle of all of them. . . . The same feeling pre- vails amongst the men represented by the Warder, and the least hint of what I have told you about the denunciation will at once change their tone. How far the separation of the individuals connected with the Nation, and those who would go in with us in such a quarrel, from personal co-operation with O'Connell would serve or hurt Repeal deserves consideration. Finally the question at issue is religious liberty. I for one will not sacrifice my right to it for any consideration. We are assailed for con- demning the Roman Censorship, for praising the simplicity of Presbyterian tenets, for not believing ' O'Coniiell's miracle/ for appreciating "Win. Carleton's genius, while we condemned his early offences against the Roman Catholics, and finally for resisting all sorts of religious persecution from brickbats to defamation. If I am to be set upon for these things, and the Nation officially denounced or systematically run down for them, I pause ere I give any more help to put power into the hands of men with such intolerant principles. . . . Mr. Hutchison during my absence wrote to me to say he had spoken to Maurice O'Connell, who professed to agree with him as to the impolicy and injustice of these attacks, but in order to bring this matter to an end, and to enable Protestant Repealers to know where they are drifting, I w r ould entreat of you to write without delay to O'Connell before worse things happen. . . . O'C.'s Federalism is self-contradictory. Two Supreme Parliaments ! bah ! that is not Federalism, nor Porterism, nor anything but an apology for a guilty blunder. " Of course you heard of his letter to Pierce Mahony to get up a Federalist Declaration. This converted Pierce, who showed the letter all over Dublin. Not one influential Federalist would go into the same room with him ; so between O'Connell's letter and his agent a Federalist declaration is very doubtful.'"* Looking back on the facts in the perspective of a * Cahennoyle Correspondence, Nov. 3, 1844. RELIGIOUS INTRIGUES, AT HOME AXD ABROAD. 617 quarter of a century and upwards, I do not insist that nothing was written in the Nation to which a censor might take legitimate exception. The writers were of various creeds, they were engrossed with political, not theological questions, they aimed to unite the people, and naturally dwelt upon points of agreement rather than on points of controversy. But I do insist with full knowledge of the circumstances, that there was not the faintest truth in the charges made against them of a design or desire to reject religious authority. In a community fed for generations on mutual prejudice they preached " a truce of the Lord," and it was because they did so that the cause had won so many important recruits. To discuss the tendency of writings is to embark in an interminable dispute, but I can speak con- fidently of motives and intentions. The passion for liberty which had burned up the trivialities of youth, and cleared their lives of foppery and licentiousness, left no room for sectarian animosities. But it would have been easier I am persuaded to have found among them, than among any group of their cotemporaries, men who would have laid down their lives for their religious convictions. The influence of their writings has confessedly been to make the young men of their race for two generations more upright, truthful and generous ; if they have lessened the reverence of any one for the obligations of conscience or religion, I have never heard of such a case. The orthodoxy of a man however is like the chastity of a woman; a nod, a shrug will bring it into question, and what can a modest 618 YOUNG IRELAND. woman or a pious man do to remove such a doubt ? We can measure the morbid susceptibility of the religious sentiment when we remember that Monta- lembert was denounced from the pulpit of Notre Dame as a bad Catholic, and Walter Scott charged by the evangelical press of Edinburgh with promulgating Atheism. O'Brien replied to Davis in terms which, read a generation later, must be recognised as just and reason- able in their general scope ; but at the moment they were probably not a little exasperating as an answer to the warning of a danger which was imminent, and which might lay the national cause prostrate at the feet of its enemies. c ' In compliance with your request/' he said, " I have written to O'Connell requesting 1 his intervention to put a stop to the discussions arising amongst the national party. I have read the letter of an Irish Priest. It is very clever, very Catholic, and if unity were not essential it would be a fair manifestation of opinions adverse to those promulgated by the Nation. I need not say I agree much more with the opinions of the writer in the Nation, than with those of the Irish Priest, but then you and I should remember that we are Protestants, and that the bulk of the Irish nation are Catholics. I foresee however that unless O'Connell is able and willing to act as a mediator on the present occasion we shall have a Priest and an Anti-Priest party among the Catholics of Ireland. This I should much deplore. Unity is essential to our success, and therefore division at present would be madness, but even if Repeal were won I should deeply regret such encroachments on the part of the clergy as would justify organised resistance, or what is quite as bad, infidel hos- tility to all those feelings and opinions upon which religion rests. RELIGIOUS INTRIGUE 8, AT HOME AND ABROAD. 619 I make these observations without professing any sort of pro- pagandism in regard of the matter of Faith, and as an uncom- promising advocate of civil and religious liberty in its most unlimited sense."* John O'Connell replied to similar remonstrances, and to a note on the Federal controversy, by some unctuous generalities which left the business where he found it. " I need not in any way discuss the question of the letters of the ' Irish Priest ' as my father has written to you on that sub- ject ; and I think I had better not interfere. Neither will I discuss the Federalist affair. My father is gone to town to show what his ideas, plans and hopes are ; and you have there the opportunity of discussing them with him, while I, in these re- mote parts, remain in waiting for his words to influence my opinions and acts. I am very sorry indeed to gather from your letter that neither your bodily health nor spirits are what I sincerely wish them. Take care you do not overwork both, as I strongly think you may have done; especially the physical vigour. To judge from your sweet poetry the powers of the mind in no way fail under their fatigue /"f But his father was sufficiently precise and specific. He wrote ten days after the Federal controversy had commenced, and the tone of his letter indicates how deeply he was offended. The writers in the Nation were of course entitled to disbelieve the State Trial Miracle and " every other miracle from the days of the Apostles to the present ; " but Catholics must be left free to believe them, if they saw reason to do so. As to his using his * Davis Papers. Cahermoyle, Nov. 5, 1844. O'Brien to Davis. t Davis Papers. John O'Connell to Davis. Danynane, Nov. 16, 1844. 620 YOUNG IRELAND. influence to prevent the newspaper war he had no such influence. The Nation was wrong in the controversy with the Review ; but he was only anxious that it should escape the possible consequences and be lucrative and successful. As for his correspondent he had a great regard for him and heartily forgave him the unfair insinuations which his note contained. " You are really an exceedingly clever fellow, and I should most bitterly regret that we lost you by reason of any Protestant monomania. "'' No public notice was taken by the young men of these underhand proceedings ; some faint echo of the subterranean controversy however appeared in the Conservative press, which affirmed that for their success in the Federal controversy the Young Irelanders were about to be sacrificed. But this was a result not so easily attained. The young men gathered round Davis with prompt loyalty. They insisted on his taking some part in the public business of the Association, that the people might come to know him ; and his name for the first time began to appear in reports and speeches con- * This remarkable letter will be found in a note at the end of the chapter. By some Post Office accident it did not reach Davis for several weeks after its date, and has since lain hid for a whole generation. t "Mr. Duffy has already declared that he will not follow Mr. O'Connell in his tergiversation, and the enthusiasts whose writing in his journal have given to the cause whatever dignity belongs to it, will abide by him. Already we are informed have the engines of intolerance been set in motion to crush the Nation. The cry of infidelity has been raised ; . . . the underlings of the faction are now denouncing its independence and prophesying its downfall ; and we shall not be surprised if a few days bring us accounts that an open war is waged upon a journal that but a few months ago commanded a popularity unprecedented in Ireland." Morning Herald. Mr. Butt was at this time a contributor to the Morning Herald and was presumably the writer of this article. RELIGIOUS INTRIGUES, AT HOME AND ABROAD. 621 nected with some of the work he had done, which they would not consent any longer to ignore. MacNevin, who was deficient in reticence and easily moved with generous impatience, broke out in the Association and in the provincial press in his direct defence;* but his other friends maintained a haughty but watchful silence. O'Brien insisted however on his taking the chair of the Association at one of the weekly meetings,! and the use he made of the occasion was characteristic. Instead of flattering the pride or the hopes of the people, he told them the stern truth that they would fail ignominiously if they did not cultivate the qualities essential to success. No enrolment of members or collection of funds would win national liberty except on this condition.! * " Woe to the country wherein could be found a single tongue to slander so pure, so upright, so earnest a man ; one whose indomitable labour, whose wonderful information, and whose glorious enthusiasm are devoted without one thought of ambition or self to the elevation of Ireland ; to the arduous task of doing what Mr. Grey Porter calls raising our country." Letter of MacNevin to Belfast Vindicator. f " I must positively insist on your taking the chair next Monday. The time is come when you ought to act a prominent part in Irish affairs." Davis Papers. O'Brien to Davis, Jan. 7, 1845. I " Trust me (he said) that no men in the country have more clearly considered the greatness of English power and the animosity of English feeling towards Ireland than the men who are now in that box [the box reserved for the Committee] and who in the Committee room upstairs laboured day after day to remove English rule from Ireland. Have ycm before embarking in this great contest looked to the magnitude of it ? Have you clearly weighed that this power which you seek to get rid of has now ruled your country for six centuries ; that it is an empire with hun- dreds of thousands of soldiers in India, and with an extent of Canadian territory so large that from its face the whole surface of England and Ireland would not be missed ; or are you men who have rashly entered into perchance a quarrel certainly a serious moral struggle with such a power as this ? If you are, and you are now looking upon these things for the first time, you will be beaten, and will deserve to be beaten ; you will be trampled on by the British Minister. If you are cowards if you are rash if you are capricious men who shrink from long labour I tell you, 622 YOUNG IRELAND. But events intervened which made any immediate conflict between the parties ill-timed and dangerous ; the Association itself was in peril of losing its authority. Before the meeting of Parliament political gossip was unusually busy in forecasting the business of the session. It had leaked out in the great party clubs that something quite new would be attempted ; some- thing, it was mysteriously hinted, which would take Ireland out of the hands of O'Connell and the Repealers. The Whigs had jeeringly recommended Peel to try con- cession instead of coercion, and the whisper grew that he would improve on their hint ; concessions of a large and practical character addressed respectively to every great interest in the country being in preparation. But this was not his only device for taking Ireland out of the hands of the Repealers ; there were at the same time sinister rumours that he had prevailed on the Propa- ganda, through a confidential agent at Rome, to forbid the Catholic clergy from taking any further part in the national movement. Since the reign of Elizabeth the Government of England was forbidden by a penal law to hold direct communication with the Holy See ; but the Stuarts openly or secretly, William III. through his continental allies, and the House of Brunswick by the agency of Hanover, had maintained a representative you will be beaten and put down amidst the scorn of Europe and you will deserve it. But if you have clearly considered the cost of what you are doing, if you are resolved that you will succeed from this spot in the name of my friends in your name I may tell the British Minister to give up this idle contest in which he must eventually be beaten." RELIGIOUS INTRIGUES, AT HOME AND ABROAD. 623 near the Pope. A newspaper ordinarily well informed on Catholic interests * published correspondence from Rome strengthening these reports ; and the Press which called itself Protestant repeated them with malicious triumph over the discomfiture of the Repealers. The Nation met the double project promptly and frankly. If Peel, it was said, hoped to denationalise the Irish people by making them prosperous and con- tented let him try, and he should have thanks and applause for every good measure, whatever was his motive in proposing it. If he hoped to coerce or trick Ireland by any arrangement with the See of Rome, as if the Irish were a handful of prisoners whom the Pope could surrender in chains to English vengeance, he was laying up for himself disappointment and disaster. The Court of Rome had learned a bitter lesson from the working of Concordats granted to Protestant Governments,- and were unlikely to concede another. But though all the parchment of Rome were granted to Downing Street the Irish clergy would maintain that faith in Irish freedom which the sword of Cromwell, and the gibbet and scourge of his successors, had failed to extirpate. The story of a Concordat was doubtful; let the truth be probed; let two delegates from the clergy and two from the laity of Ireland go to Rome, and ascertain whether the English Minister sought to make the Vatican an ally of St. James' against Ireland. * The Freeman's Journal. The information was understood to have come from Dr. (afterwards Cardinal) Cullen. who represented many of the Irish bishops in their business with the Propaganda. 624 YOUNG IRELAND. If tlie story proved to be false, the lie might be flung in the face of the baffled intriguers ; if it proved to be true, if the ministers not content with trying to repeal the absurd statute of Premunire and to open a Christian diplomacy at Eome, had frightened or deceived the Holy See into measures injurious to the independence of the Irish Church, the course of the people would be plain and their blow decisive. Mr. O'Neill Daunt, whose presumed relations with O'Connell gave his action significance, opened the sub- ject in the Association. A conspiracy he believed was on foot to induce the Pope to prohibit the Catholic clergy from taking part in the Repeal Movement. With what shameful inconsistency English statesmen acted ; they required Catholics to swear that the Pope neither had, nor ought to have any temporal authority in Ireland ; and they were labouring underhand to induce him to exercise the very authority the existence of which Catholics were required to deny upon oath. He did not believe that his Holiness would be induced to forget the just distinction between his temporal and spiritual power ; but even supposing that improbable case the people of Ireland would not forget it. Nor would the clergy of Ireland. If a rescript emanated from Rome denouncing the national movement the Catholics of Ireland would treat it as so much waste paper. They had been charged with holding a divided allegiance ; if they should obey the papal mandate on a subject purely temporal they would confirm the charge. Repealers were the sworn foes of . all foreign dictation in their domestic affairs. They hated foreign interference when exercised by an English Parliament ; and they would not find it sweeter exercised by a RELIGIOUS INTRIGUES, AT HOME AND ABROAD. 625 Roman Pontiff. Of the friends around him O'Brien, Grattan, and Davis had strong Protestant convictions ; MacNevin had strong Catholic convictions, and he himself had recently published a book intended to exhibit the Divine truth of Catholicity ; but they all alike Protestant and Catholic had strong Irish convic- tions, and the strongest of these was that nothing but evil could arise from foreign dictation in Irish affairs.* These rumours obtained unexpected confirmation by a letter from O'Connell to the Catholic Bishop of Meath. He warned the prelates of Ireland that Mr. Petre, an English Catholic, was employed by Peel at B/ome to negotiate a concordat which would give the English Government control over the Catholic hierarchy, in return for great concessions and liberal pecuniary as- sistance to the Catholics in British possessions abroad. Mr. Petre was aided by an agent of the Austrian Government. This bait he affirmed had taken, and had already produced a letter from the Propaganda to Arch- bishop Crolly unfavourable to the Eepeal Association. The strength of the English envoy consisted in the support of Austria, whose assistance was needed to repress insurrection in the Papal States and throughout Italy. Thus the British agent, backed by the Austrian, was almost irresistible with the politicians of the Court of Home. To meet this intrigue he recommended a deputation to Eome. The laity ought to send two delegates to insist that the Irish Catholics in their struggle along with liberal Protestants, for liberty, ought not to be impeded by any species of ecclesi- * Repeal Association, January 13th, 1845. O O 626 YOUNG IRELAND. astical censure or intervention whatever. He hoped some of the bishops might be sent on a similar deputa- tion. They must meet the conspiracy and crush it for ever. A deputation to Rome was the course previously recommended by the Nation; but O'Connell was no longer fruitful in device, even where he was greatly moved. Henry Grattan followed up this beginning by reading to the Association the opinions delivered in 1789, at the request of Mr. Pitt, by the Universities of Louvain and Valladolid and the Sacred Faculty of Paris, that neither the Pope, nor the Cardinals, nor any body of men, or any other person, in the Church of Rome, have any civil authority, power, jurisdiction, or pre-eminence in England or in any kingdom outside the States of the Church. That some negotiations had been opened at Rome is certain, but they had not taken the precise shape which rumour attributed to them. The Lord Lieutenant was able to address a letter to Archbishop Murray denying on the part of the Government that there ever had existed the intention of negotiating a concordat. And Archbishop Crolly, who published the letter he had received from the Prefect of the Propaganda,* declared at the same time that he would resist by every influence in his power the project of a concordat, if any such project was meditated. The prefect's letter restricted itself to questions of ecclesiastical discipline and conduct. It appeared by newspapers brought under * Cardinal Fransoni. RELIGIOUS INTRIGUES, AT HOME AND AH ROAD. 627 the notice of the Holy See that speeches were made to the people at meetings and banquets, and even in churches, by certain of the priesthood, and by some of the Bishops, which did not show them to be solely intent (as they ought to Le) on the salvation of souls, and strangers to the strife of political parties or temporal engrossments. The Primate was directed to counsel ecclesiastics, especially those holding the episcopal office, whom he perceived in any degree wandering from these precepts. Here were the specific orders of the Holy See, speak- ing through the Propaganda ; and a political philoso- pher who made no allowance for the influence of human nature on human action, might infer from the discipline of the Catholic Church a prompt and strict submission. But the Irish Bishops knew their countrymen much better than Peel or the Propaganda did. Had the policy of this rescript been peremptorily enforced it is certain, in the temper of the people at that time, that it would have been met by a storm of wrath and resistance. The majority of the Bishops with com- mendable prudence evaded this catastrophe. They interpreted the letter of the Cardinal Prefect as cen- suring only the use of violent and intemperate language. They did not consider it incompatible with taking a moderate and prudent part in public affairs, and they continued to correspond with, and contribute to the .Repeal Association as before. The end it was designed to accomplish may be surmised from the conduct of the minority of the Bishops, who accepted it as conveying o o 2 628 YOUNG IRELAND. a complete prohibition of attending any meeting or banquet for political purposes.* The Duke of Wellington who, in civil affairs at any rate, knew when he was beaten, admitted that this diplomatic stroke had failed. O'Connell and his " democracy," he said, " are too strong for the Eoman Catholic nobility, gentry, and hierarchy, with or without the Pope." t * Letter of the Right Reverend Dr. Cantwell, Bishop of Meath, to O'Connell. Nation, January 18th, 1845. f Conversation with Mr. Raikes, September, 1843. " Raikes' Jour- nals." Negotiation with the Pope was a Whig not less than a Tory practice. Lord Palmerston a few years later wrote to Lord Minto (then at Rome " not as a minister accredited to the Pope but as an authentic organ of the British Government ") " We wish to make to the Pope the plain, simple, and reasonable request that he would exert his influence over the Irish priesthood to induce them to abstain from meddling in politics." And again apropos of the Provincial Colleges, " Ton mnst say (to the Pope) that if he expects the English Government to be of any use to him. and to take any interest in his affairs, he must not strike blows at our interior." Mr. Evelyn Ashley's Life of Lord Palmerston, Yol. I., pages 38 & 40. RELIGIOUS INTRIGUES, AT HOME AND ABROAD. 62D NOTE ON CHAPTEE IV. O'CONNELL'S LETTER TO DAVIS. Derryiiane, Oct. 30, 1844. MY DEAR DAVIS, My son John has given me to read your Protestant philippic from Belfast. I have undertaken to answer it, because your writing to my son seems to bespeak a foregone' conclusion in your mind, that we were in some way connected with the attacks upon the Nation. Now I most solemnly declare that you are most entirely mistaken none of us has the slightest inclination to do anything that could in anywise injure that paper, or its estimable proprietor; and certainly we are not directly or indirectly implicated in the attacks upon it. With respect to the " Italian Censorship " the Nation ought to be at the fullest liberty to abuse it : and as regards " the State Trial Miracle' 1 the Nation should be at liberty to abuse not only that, but. every other miracle from the days of the Apostles to the present. But we Catholics on the other hand may be permitted to believe as many of these miracles as we may adopt either from credulity or convincing proofs; at the same time that I see no objection to a Catholic priest arguing any of these points or censuring, in suitable and civil terms, opinions contrary to his own. As to the Cork attack upon a Protestant Proselyte you know that I publicly and most emphatically condemned it ; as did the Catholic press of Cork. With respect to the Dublin Review the word " insolence " appears to me to be totally inapplicable all the Review did (and I have examined it again deliberately) was to insist that a man who from being a Catholic- became a Protestant, was not a faithworthy witness in his attacks upon the Catholic clergy. Now independent of that man's religion, of which I care nothing, there never lived a more odious and disgusting public writer ; with one single exception, and that is the passage in which he praises you.* The " insolence " of the Dublin Review consisted, as I have said, of merely stating that a pervert from Catholicity, who abused the Catholic clergy, was a suspicious witness in declaring their guilt. Would you not have a right if a person who from being a Protestant became a Catholic and abused the Protestant clergy, to state that his evidence against them ought to be considered as suspicious, or even unworthy of belief ? yet for no greater offence than that, the Review is attacked, and a high and a haughty tone of threatening assumed in speaking of it. I really think you might have spared the insinuation that you and other Protestants were "pioneering the way to power," for men who would establish any sort of Catholic ascendency. I know this and I declare it most solemnly, that in the forty years I have been labouring for the public, I never heard one bigoted expression, not only in our public meetings but in our committees and private discussions, from a Catholic but I have * Smith O'Brien had a very different opinion of Maddyn. Davis wrote a little earlier : " O'Brien is in delight with your book. He says not three men in the empire could write so well, and hopes and expects you to be yet with us and for us. God grant it." (Davis to Maddyn, 28 Sept, '44.) 630 YOUNG IRELAND. often felt amongst SOME of the Liberal Protestants I have met with, that there was not the same soundness of generous liberality amongst them as amongst the Catholics. I hate bigotry of every kind, Catholic, Protestant or Dissenter, but I do not think there is any room for my interfering by any public declara- tion at present. I cannot join in the exaltation of Presbyterian purity or brightness of faith ; at the same time that I assert for everybody a perfect right to praise both the one and the other, liable to be assailed in argument, by those who choose to enter into the controversy at the other side. But with respect to the Dublin Revieiv, I am perfectly convinced the Nation was in the wrong. However I take no part either one way or the other in the subject. As to my using my influence to prevent this newspaper war I have no such influence that I could bring to bear ; you really can much better influence the continuance or termination of this by battle than I can. All I am anxious about is the property in the Nation. I am most anxious that it should be a lucrative and profitable concern. My desire is to pro- mote its prosperity in every way I could; I am besides proud as an Irish- man of the talent displayed in it ; and by no one more than by yourself. It is really an honour to the country ; and if you would lessen a little of your Protestant zeal, and not be angry when you " play at bowls in meeting rubbers," I should hope that this skirmish being at an end, the writers for the Nation will continue their soul-stirring spirit-enlivening strains, and will continue " to pioneer the way " to genuine Liberty, to perfect liberality, and entire political equality for all religious persuasions. If I did not believe that the Catholic religion could compete upon equal and free terms with any other religion, I would not continue a Catholic for one hour. You have vexed me a little by the insinuations which your letter neces- sarily contains, but I heartily forgive you ; you are really an exceedingly clever fellow, and I should most bitterly regret that we lost you by reason of any Protestant monomania. We Papists require co-operation, support, combination, but we do not want protection or patronage. I beg of you, my dear Davis, to believe, as you may do, in the fullest confidence that I am most sincerely Tour attached friend DANIEL O'CONNELL. CHAPTER V. PEEL'S CONCESSIONS TO IRELAND. To prepare for Peel's proposals now became necessary. O'Brien urged O'Connell to resume his place in the Association before Parliament met, and he assented with an effusion of confidence and gratitude. " Aux ordres, as they say in France. I cheerfully obey your com- mands, for your wish is to me a command. . . . Beckon therefore on my meeting you at the Association on Monday, and returning you thanks for your inestimable services. You literally are a living treasure to the cause." And again on the question of attending Parlia- ment. " Are we to go over ? Decide for me, as well as for yourself, and if that decision be in favour of action I mean of course of going over, I will leave this for Dublin immediately after I get your answer."' But when he arrived it was noted with dismay that he had nothing to propose, except the formal abandonment of the projects with which he had opened the renewed agitation. The Irish members would not bring the question of the State Trials before Parliament. The Whigs advised them to do so, but if * Cahermoyle Correspondence. O'Connell to O'Brien, Jan., 1846. 632 YOUNG IRELAND. the "Whigs thought the experiment a good one let them make it themselves. What inducement was there to appeal to England? The Tory Press had of course attacked him, but the Whig Press had assailed him in a more truculent manner and so far from inciting the people of England to demand the impeachment of those who took part in the trial, they dissipated whatever feeling there might exist on the subject.* At a sub- sequent meeting he submitted resolutions affirming that the hopelessness of obtaining redress from the Imperial Parliament made it useless to appeal to it ; and that the Irish members by attending in Conciliation Hall would best further the restoration of a domestic legisla- ture. O'Brien concurred in thinking the Repeal members would be more useful at home ; but though he had originated this policy, he was not willing to push it to irrational extremes. Having Peel's new measures in view they must, he said, be prepared to go to London whenever the exigencies of the country required it. Parliament met, and the English Minister's proposals became known. They were practical and substantial measures of relief. The education of the Catholic Priesthood at St. Patrick's College, Maynooth, was con- ducted with sordid economy, on a small annual grant, which at each renewal was made the subject of offensive controversy in the House of Commons. He proposed to increase the grant to a sum more adequate to the service, and to withdraw it from annual controversy by making it a permanent appropriation. The education * Repeal Association, Jan. 27. PEEL'S CONCESSIONS TO IRELAND. 633 of the middle classes in Ireland was in a shameful condition. The Protestants were in exclusive enjoy- ment of such endowed schools as existed ; and they were few and ill regulated. The Catholic laity did not possess a single school subsidised by the state. He pro- posed to create Colleges for the middle classes which would remove this reproach. In the previous year as we have seen he had appointed a Eoj^al Commission to enquire into the condition of land tenure in Ireland ; and it was intimated that a Bill was in preparation founded on their report. The Nation gave the promised reforms a frank welcome. The men whom it represented were not afraid of prosperity. It is not a prosperous people, they said, who bend their knees to subjection. On the contrary out of wealth and leisure come the longings of nationality and the ambition to rule. The full yeoman and the successful merchant would not accept a domina- tion which the shivering pauper and the ruined shop- keeper had spurned. Thrice welcome then was every- thing, great or small, which enriched the people or made them skilful and wise. These concessions and especially the Maynooth Grant were very offensive to Irish Tories. Was Peel, they asked, again going to play the traitor ? for to concede anything to the race they had so long wronged was treason to them. When an English minister was to be intimidated the stock resource with the Irish gentry was to murmur nationality, and there were now to be heard in unaccustomed places allusions to 1782, and the 634 YOUNG IRELAND. memory of Flood and Charlemont. Among the Pro- testant artisans who were too simple and downright for diplomacy, and who had no interest to divide them from their fellow-countrymen, these allusions began to be repeated with an emphasis the sincerity of which could not be mistaken. They were distracted by a painful struggle between the bigotry in which they had been bred, and the nationality which was becoming so attrac- tive, and they could not determine on a clear course. But it was plain they were on the move. Early in February a meeting was held in the Eoyal Exchange to devise means for encouraging Irish manufactures. In that Hall, vacant because Irish trade was in decay, but where the statues of Grattan and Lucas forbade it to be forgotten that under its dome the business of a prosperous nation had once been transacted, a number of needy artisans and a few of the popular leaders assembled. O'Connell, O'Brien, Davis, and MacNevin came from the Eepeal Association ; Sir James Murray, and James Haughton, Dr. Maunsell, and the Lord Mayor from the general body of citizens. Before the business com- menced the Rev. Tresham Gregg, Grand Chaplain of the Orangemen, and the leader and idol of the " Pro- testant Operatives," entered the Exchange, and announced his intention of taking part in the proceedings. His speech was a curious image of the conflicting sentiments by which his party was agitated. The new sympathy for nationality found voice first. He came there, he said, with a heart glowing with affection for his country. Though he was popularly regarded as a man actuated PEEL'S CONCESSIONS TO IRELAND. 635 solely by bigotry, he had no doubt that the meeting would give him a fair hearing and judge for themselves whether he was not as anxious as the most jealous among them to forward the interests of Ireland. He had heard it said/ that the Orange and Green must be combined together. He was identified with the Orange but he dearly loved the Green. He believed in his conscience that Ire- land was an ill-treated and ill-governed country. She had resources second to scarcely any state in Europe. He never visited England without being struck by the marked and painful contrast between the two countries. When he considered the great men who had made Ireland illustrious ; when he remem- bered the patriotism of Grattan, the science of Berkeley, the noble intrepidity of Swift, the admirable gifts of Moore, and corning to our own day when he contemplated the genius and eloquence which week after week were displayed in the Nation, he found everywhere emanations of the Irish mind so marked by power that other countries might envy it. Looking from North to South, from East to West, he saw a people patient to suffer, active to labour, quick to conceive, bold to dare, a people second to none in the world whether for physical prowess or the more sublime attributes of the mind. Blessed with such advantages, inhabited by such a people, what was Ireland ? A wagging of the head among the nations, a distracted ill-used land, as noted for her sufferings as she was distinguished by her gifts. Ireland instead of being a submissive province might, if it so pleased the Almighty Ruler of things, stretch her sceptre over wide dominions. This was speaking a language which found a joyful reception from his audience. But to remedy these evils Mr. Gregg fell back upon his traditional opinions. Protestantism being the established religion in Ireland ought to be sustained ; it was absurd of the Govern- 636 70UNG IRELAND. ment, who to his thinking were a contemptible crew, to encourage systems opposed to it. Out of this hybrid harangue each party took what suited it. O'Connell declared he had never listened to a better speech and that for the rest of his life, let Mr. Gregg do what he might, he would never utter a reproach. His own party recognised the old note of " Protestant Ascendency " but missed the blare of " No surrender," and were not altogether content. Mr. Maxwell, a scion of the Farnham family, who probably saw with dismay the fictitious nationality of the gentry echoed in good faith by their retainers, refused to fulfil an engagement to preside at Mr. Gregg's Protestant " Operative Society " because that gentleman had been guilty of the crime of associating with Repealers and Papists. Early in April there was a more important evidence of the change in Protestant sentiment. Mr. Grey Porter authorised Smith O'Brien to propose him a member of the Association, stipulating however for the strange condition that he should be at liberty to advocate an alternative to Repeal. His fine natural abilities, frank generous character, social position, and manly bearing (he was a handsome young squire in those days) would have rendered him a very important recruit, had these gifts been ballasted by a more solid judgment. But he wanted patience, and the habit of forecasting his course, and could not be counted on for a persistent policy. His first speech in the Associa- tion made an immediate impression by its openness PEEL'S CONCESSIONS TO IRELsiND. 637 and unreserve. He joined, he said, from no feeling of animosity towards the English people, but on the con- trary with the strongest desire to promote union and intercourse of every sort between the two nations. Ireland had outgrown the treaty of Union made at a time when England treated the Irish as an inferior people, but a new Union might be framed which would recognise the independence of Ireland as a voluntary partner in the Hiberno-British Empire. This plan would be supported by many persons in England and Ireland who would never join the Repeal party. An unfair pro- portion of the public burden was thrown upon Ireland and she could get no redress, because while in population she was as forty- five to a hundred and in territory as thirty-nine to a hundred, her members were only in the proportion of nineteen to every hundred and forty British members. And she was governed in a widely different spirit. The other day Sir Thomas Freemantle on assuming the office of Chief Secretary confessed that he was unacquainted with the country he came to rule, but announced as his policy that Ireland must be governed like Yorkshire or Corn- wall. How many votes would a candidate for Yorkshire get if he proposed that Yorkshire must be governed like Ireland ? The inveterate prejudices which separated the Protestant gentlemen and yeomen of Ulster from their Catholic countrymen were in rapid process of dissolution. The Act of 1800 was daily losing favour in the eyes of the men of Ulster, and in the end like their ancestors the Volunteers of '82 they would follow the generous impulses of their hearts and stand up for Ireland. Having secured the sympathy of his audience by this skilful exordium, he invited them to consider the difficulties of the position. The first and greatest diffi- culty was the unwillingness of many sensible men in Ulster and elsewhere to commit themselves to the national movement. They held back under the belief 638 YOUNG IRELAND. that the Association was a mere instrument in the hands of Mr. O'Connell. But this was not the fact. Though the Duke of Leinster became a member Mr. O'Connell would still be the first man ; he was the captain, they were his army ; but that the Association was O'Connellite in'the sense that he could turn it as he pleased to his own purpose, they utterly denied. It was the Council chamber where men of all creeds and classes could express their individual opinions frankly. The second reason why many men of education and rank still kept aloof was because they only desired an Irish Parliament as a last alternative, in case of the continued refusal of the London Parliament to redress the grievances of the country. The third reason was quite different from the others, but it was the most important of all ; it was the non- publication of the Repeal accounts. The most certain injury the Association had ever sustained arose from this omission. As there was no man so interested in the success of the movement as Mr. O'Connell, for it was to him history would award all the glory of success, he had taken the liberty of privately speaking to him on the subject. He could not have joined the Association were it not that Mr. O'Connell gave a distinct promise that the accounts should be published, item by item every week, that every subscriber might know how his money was spent. Lastly in joining the Association he felt the most unbounded loyalty to the Queen, and no matter what events happened, no Irishman must try to impair the rights which descended to her from her royal ancestors. Such a frank and manly criticism, had it been followed up by corresponding action, might have pro- PEEL'S CONCESSIONS TO IRELAND. 639 duced important and even decisive results. But it was destined to have a different issue ; after a few weeks Mr. Porter retired from the Association as precipitately as he had joined it, and the engagement made to him was not carried out.* Before his coming, and after he left, the Repeal fund was a topic of constant uneasiness to the best men in the movement. O'Gonnell retained in his own hands the exclusive control of the immense receipts, on the grounds that it was necessary to provide secretly for expenditure which the courts might pronounce illegal. The people who contributed the money would probably have authorised him to take this course, had they been appealed to. But they were not apprised of the arrangement, and this was the fatal weakness of his position. He had broken with Mr. Purcell however on the same question, and he could not be moved from his policy. He disposed of the funds doubtless in the manner which he considered most serviceable to the public cause, but the practice had the effect Mr. Porter attributed to it, of sowing suspicion and sapping confi- dence. And it tortured men like O'Brien, Davis and his comrades, none of whom would accept so much as a postage stamp from the fund. But they could not remedy the wrong except at the cost of destroying the Association. Some pious partisans of O'Connell de- clared that their morbid anxiety about the funds resembled Judas' hypocritical lamentation over Mary * It is proper to note, however, that he long continued to write upon Irish interests with knowledge and power. 640 YOUNG IRELAND. Magdalen's wastefulness, when the precious ointment was poured on the feet of her Master. A more stringent stimulus than Mr. Porter's speech, was applied to public opinion by the report of the Devon Commission.* The Commissioners were landed proprietors and Unionists, who had no sympathy or interest in popular agitation ; but half unconsciously they unveiled a series of social phenomena like those which in Arthur Young's pages explain and palliate the subsequent horrors of the French Revolution. The destitute poor amounted to one-third of the entire population. Agriculture was the national pursuit, but the men employed in it were steeped in poverty and misery ; and this poverty and misery was traceable to English law and the English connection as its fountain head. Much of the land was held in principalities by absentees, mainly English Peers, who were described as " regardless and neglectful of their properties in Ireland." The effect of the laws under which the bulk of the people had lived since the Revolution laws framed or sanctioned by the English Privy Council was "to create a feeling of insecurity which directly checked industry." The land owners, it was confessed, had trafficked mercilessly in the happiness and lives of the tenantry. To create votes when votes were a saleable property, and to increase produce when prices were high, they had multiplied small tenancies ; and when prices * The Commissioners were the Earl of Devon, the chairman from whom it took its name, Sir Robert Ferguson, M.P., Mr. George Alexander Hamilton, M.P. Mr. (afterwards Sir Thomas) Redington and Mr. Wynne ; with Captain Pitt Kennedy ajS secretary. PEEL'S CONCESSIONS TO IRELAND. 6il fell and votes became precarious, they had cleared out tenants with the same indifference that a man thins his warrens, or diminishes his grazing stock. Tenancy at will had produced a condition of national existence the like of which was to be found nowhere under the sky of heaven. The farm labourers depended on casual employment for daily bread, were badly housed, badly clothed and badly paid. In many districts their only food was the potato, their only drink the running stream; their cabin was seldom a shelter against weather, a bed or blanket was a rare luxury among them, and commonly a pig and a manure heap constitute their sole property. They were generally holders of small farms till the practice of systematic ejectment had commenced. When they were ejected they flocked to the towns and carried disease and death in their train. " It would be impossible " say the commissioners " for language to convey an idea of the state of distress to which the ejected tenantry have been reduced, or of the disease, misery, and even vice which they have propagated in the towns wherein they have settled ; so that not only they who have been ejected have been rendered miserable, but they have carried with them and propagated that misery. They have increased the stock of labour ; they have rendered the habitations of those who received them more crowded ; they have given occasion to the dissemina- tion of disease ; they have been obliged to resort to theft and all manner of vice and iniquity to procure subsistence, but what is the most painful of all a vast number of them perished from want/'* This population has been habitually described as violent and revengeful, in newspapers supported by * Devon Report, page 21. P P 642 YOUNG IRELAND. their oppressors in order to misrepresent them, but the Commission bore different testimony. The labouring population they admitted had generally exhibited a patient endurance, under sufferings greater than the people of any other country in Europe had to sustain. With the report was published the evidence of the principal witnesses. Many Englishmen, well disposed towards Ireland, were long perplexed by the fact that agrarian outrages commonly occurred in the South or West, and were seldom heard of in Ulster ; and they saw no escape from the explanation, tendered by the No-Popery Press, that this contrast was referable to the Scotch descent or the Protestant creed of the popula- tion. The agents of great proprietors in Ulster set this difficulty effectually at rest. There were few agrarian outrages in Ulster because there were few agrarian grievances ; wherever the grievances appeared the out- rages speedily followed. From the time of the Planta- tion a custom existed to allow the tenant when he desired to quit his holding, to sell the goodwill or right of possession, and it was sometimes worth twenty years' purchase. The courtiers who obtained the original grants from James I. w^ere generally absentees ; the actual planters were farmers with some skill and capital and, as a witness significantly remarked, "they were Protestants with arms in their hands." The practice of selling the goodwill, which was at first a concession to the tenantry, was found to be equally beneficial to the landlords. It caused estates to be improved without any expenditure of capital by the owner, and it secured PEEL'S CONCESSIONS TO IRELAND. 6i3 the payment of arrears of rent ; for an occupier could only sell his tenant-right on condition of discharging his liability to the landlord. Some attempts had recently been made on certain estates to disallow tenant-right, and the attempt had been immediately followed by offences of the same character complained of in the South : the incoming tenant's house was burned, his cattle houghed (the tendons of the hind leg cut) or his crops trodden down by night. The disallowance of tenant-right, said Lord Lurgan's agent, " is always attended by outrage." The witnesses were asked what would be the effect of treating the Ulster tenantry as the Munster tenantry were habitually treated. " You would " (said the agent of the Marquis of Londonderry) "have a Tipperary in Down if it were attempted." " I do not believe," said the agent of another great proprie- tor, " there is force at the disposal of the Horse Guards sufficient to keep the peace of the province, in such a contingency."* The peace of the province was kept by a simpler method ; but it had not hitherto dawned on the minds of English Statesmen that if injustice would create a Tipperary in Down, justice it might be sur-- mised would create a Down in Tipperary. If this penetrating light had been thrown upon the condition of Russian serfs, or Indian ryots, opinion in England would have speedily adjusted itself to the new facts. But there is still I fear an Englishman, here and there, who does not quite understand the simple problem why there is peace in Down and war in Tipperary. * Evidence of Mr. Hancock, agent to Lord Lurgan. P P 2 644 YOUNG IRELAND. The first of the Irish projects submitted to Parlia- ment was the bill to endow Maynooth. It was a measure of generous statesmanship, and its character was promptly recognised in Ireland. Peel had been just, it was said, why should not we ? * Thirty thousand pounds were granted to enlarge the college, and the annual endowment to pay professors and maintain free students was raised from 9,000 to 26,000. And what was rare in parliamentary boons to Ireland, the measure w r as not fettered with any provisions offensive to the feelings of Catholics. This expenditure was not an extravagant one to educate the clergy of eight mil- lions of the people in a country where one of the richest universities in Europe provided for the education of the clergy of the minority, but it was too liberal for Eng- land, and a frenzy of resistance arose against it. Peel once more, as in 1829, was reproached as a new Iscariot. Cities and towns and villages competed for priority in denouncing the measure. Three thousand petitions were presented against it, embracing all classes from the citizens of London headed by their chief magistrate, down to the Methodists' congregation in the remotest hamlet who were enjoying the religious equality which Catholics had helped them to obtain. The petitioners were computed at a million and a quarter. The Pro- testant minority in Ireland, laden with spoil reft from the Irish nation, were among the loudest objectors. Mr. Shaw, who represented the exclusive University * See note at the end of the chapter on Peel's Concessions and Young Ireland. PEEL'S CONCESSIONS TO IRELAND. 645 of Dublin, threatened Peel with a Protestant movement for Repeal if he persisted in improving the condition of the Catholic college. Ireland, he insisted, had of late been treated rather as a colonial dependency than as an integral portion of the empire. The material interests of the country, its local boards and public institutions were neglected, its professions were lowered, and their honour sacrificed to considerations of imperial policy. Irishmen saw strangers filling the highest offices among them. The Lord Lieutenant was a pageant which had nearly ceased to dazzle ; the Irish Government began to be looked upon as a mockery ; and Dublin Castle was little more than a registration court for the rescripts of the Home Office. Were the Irish to lose the pride of nationality and not to gain the advantage of identification with England ? If, while the mass of the Irish people were struggling for a separate Parliament, England made the intelligence, the education, and the wealth of the country to tremble for their branch of the United Church, then let the British Government, and let the Imperial Parliament, beware lest they found the Irish nation for the first time united, but united in a spirit of general discontent. In the same key the Evening Mail assured Irish Protestants that they were about to be utterly be- trayed ; and forewarned them that when the church was destroyed, and Repeal accomplished, they would have bitter cause to remember that they allowed the guardianship of their religion and their liberties to pass from their own hands.* * " Let our friends reflect upon the state of the Protestant party in Ireland, and ask themselves what have they left to fight for? Their Bishops abolished. Their Church doomed. Their Clergy insulted. Their Corporations transferred. Their power of returning members swamped. Their petitions disregarded. Their lives sacrificed. Their property con- fiscated. They themselves suffering under the operations of a penal code. 646 YOUNG IRELAND. The menaces of the gentry no doubt outran their actual intentions ; but in truth they were sorely per- plexed between the organised people and a Government which treated their land laws and their venerable mono- polies as open to enquiry and amendment. Had a Federal organisation existed founded by men of their own class it might, in their temper at that moment, have exercised an irresistible influence upon them. It was pleasant to note among the hubbub of alarmed monopolists some creditable instances of fairness and sympathy. The Remonstrant Synod of Ulster, re- membering the recent assistance they had received from the Catholics, petitioned in favour of the measure. They enjoyed liberal aid, they said, for the education and support of their ecclesiastical students out of the public taxes, and they wished the same advantages to be extended to the Catholics. And the Methodists of Barnstaple in Devonshire prayed Parliament that no more public money might be advanced to the Church of England or her Universities or schools unless the college of Maynooth were allowed to participate. The resistance to the endowment, though bitter and fre- quently malevolent, was not altogether bigoted. It is impossible to doubt that it sprung in some considerable degree from preference to the voluntary system, when Mr. Bright and Mr. Sharman Crawford felt themselves The Religion antagonistic to that of the State endowed. The leaders of the Protestants mocked. The representatives of their gentry sneered at. Their old and sacred institutions made a subject of mirth. Their very action misrepresented. Their confidence in public opinion destroyed/' Dublin Evening Mail. PEEL'S CONCESSIONS TO IRELAND. 647 constrained to support it. But it sprung in the main from the blind implacable dislike to any measure favourable to religious liberty in Ireland which the bulk of the English people have so often exhibited before and since. If Englishmen of reasonable temper are of opinion that it is just to establish religious education, superintended by the National Church, in England and Scotland, and yet to rage and roar against the iniquity of doing the same thing on the smallest scale in Ireland, they may well be amazed at Irish discontent. If they are of opinion that it is not just, such amazement is insensate, for discontent .flows from injustice as surely as heat from fire. On the second reading of the Bill the Prime Minister explained and justified his new policy. There was then pending a dispute with the United States respecting England's claim to the Oregon territory, a claim which as first Minister of England he had shortly before intimated his intention of supporting by force. It was his design to make peace at home before entering upon a foreign contest ; and for this purpose he was ready to face serious difficulties, and to make painful sacrifices. He and his colleagues were warned that they were endangering their position as a government, their power as a party, and even their individual seats in the House. Perhaps so, but would anything but a sense of duty induce public men to run such risks ? He would state their object plainly. In 1843 there was formidable and dangerous excitement in Ireland, the Government had resorted to the Courts of law, which pronounced the 648 YOUNG IRELAND. condemnation of the persons engaged in these demon- strations ; a calm ensued and then he thought it was the duty of the Government to take into consideration the condition of that country. On the necessity of concession, because coercion had failed and must always fail against national sentiment, he spoke words of great weight and significance, which would have amounted to wisdom if they had animated his policy from the beginning. " You must break up the formidable conspiracy which exists against the British Government and the British connection. I do not be- lieve you can break it up by force ; but you may break it up by acting in a spirit of kindness, forbearance, and generosity." He then reminded the House in language too guarded and dignified to be an appeal to their fears, but sufficiently intelligible and significant, that before they made war on America they must make peace with Ireland. " On the far horizon of the West there was a small cloud threatening future darkness. It was his duty to state that if our rights were invaded we are de- termined and prepared to defend them. But when he was called on to make such a declaration he recollected with satisfaction and consolation that the day before he had sent a message of peace to Ireland." That foreign policy for Ireland which the Nation had broached only two years before, was at length not merely a real, but an admitted, factor in imperial politics. The Whigs had been the first to exhort Peel to try concessions, but when their advice was adopted, they PEEL'S CONCESSIONS TO IRELAND. 649 were not overjoyed at their success. Mr. Macaulay, in those days one of the chief spokesmen of the Opposition, fell foul of the Government for their sudden change of front. He supported their proposal but he complained that it should have been made by such unfitting agents. The minister, he said, had taught one immortal lesson to Ireland a lesson rulers should be slow to teach, for it is a lesson nations were not slow to learn. He had long told Ireland by his acts, now told her in express words, that the way to obtain concessions from him was by agitation. They were granted because Mr. O'Connell and Mr. Polk had made the Government uneasy ; and it seemed that the best and most effectual place for an Irish representative to serve his country was in Conciliation Hall. It was perhaps an effective stroke of parliamentary fence to smite the minister for his inconsistency ; but as Ireland was looking on, it was the stroke of a party gladiator, not of an Imperial statesman. In what followed the Whig rhetorician more plainly subordinated, the interests of his country to the interests of his party. Peel was bidding against O'Connell for the control of Ireland ; he was not making concessions to Repeal, but concessions which he hoped might mitigate the desire for Eepeal. Mr. Macaulay was coerced to vote with him, but he did his best to impede his policy. He de- manded, why after having goaded Ireland to madness for the purpose of ingratiating himself with England, the minister was setting. England on fire for the purpose of ingratiating himself with the Irish. He invited the 650 YOUNG IRELAND. Conservative party to consider where a policy would lead them, which gave nothing to justice and every- thing to fear. But whoever might coquet with Irish sedition he and his friends never would do so. They would not concede Repeal Never though the country should be surrounded by dangers as great as those which threatened her when her American colonies and France and Spain and Holland were leagued against her, and when the armed neutrality of the Baltic disputed her maritime rights ; never though another Bonaparte should pitch his camp in sight of Dover Castle ; never till all these had been staked and lost ; never till the four quarters of the world have been convulsed by the last struggle of the great English people for their place amongst nations. Challenged in this manner Sir James Graham on behalf of the Government hastened to echo the war whoop : he too would uphold the Union though the foundations of the empire should be shaken in the struggle. When these declarations reached Ireland they were met in language of dignified rebuke which Irish- men may still read with cordial assent. Smith O'Brien spoke in terms well becoming an Irish gentleman, and expressing his exact opinions and intentions. If the people of England had made up their minds, he said, so had the people of Ireland. If the question was to be treated as one in which the interests of England alone were consulted, and the interests of Ireland ignored, he was persuaded the Union could not be sustained on this basis. Though he was not fond of holding out promises, PEEL'S CONCESSIONS TO IRELAND. 651 he did not hesitate to declare that if the North joined with the South the Union would be repealed without striking a blow. " I tell Mr. Macaulay," he said in conclusion, " that if the contingency which he contemplates were to happen, it would then be too late to negotiate with the people of Ireland. I tell him that if fifty thousand French stood on the strand of Nor- mandy ready to pass over by steam to the undefended shores of Britain, if an American fleet swept the Irish Channel and carried on board regiments of Irish emigrants enrolled, armed, and disciplined, ready to land on Irish soil to defend the rights of their native land ; if the Irish soldiers in the British army, forming one- third of that entire force, should refuse, as I believe they unquestionably would refuse, to shed the blood of their fellow countrymen; if one million of the natives of Ireland resident in England and Scotland were prepared, as I am of opinion they would be prepared, to co-operate with the firm resolve of the people of this country ; if such a state of things should come to pass, why then the consummation which Mr. Macaulay appears to contemplate would take place, the British Empire would be- broken up, and thenceforward the history of Ireland would be written as that of a separate and independent country/' Mr. Grey Porter like Mr. Macaulay appealed to history. Sixty years before English politicians employed similar language. When they were asked to redress the grievances of America they declared that heaven and earth would come together before they would concede what she asked ; and yet three years later the treaty was signed that recognised the independence of the United States. And MacNevin bade Repealers remember that the party who by the mouth of Mr. Macaulay offered the Irish people the Jacobin alternative of fraternity or 652 YOUNG IRELAND. death, were the same party who, under the Rockingham administration, had solemnly pledged themselves to the legislative independence of Ireland as a final adjust- ment of the controversy between the countries, and carried through the English Parliament an act renouncing for ever all legislative control over Ireland. O'Brien's speech was undoubtedly seditious, more seditious than the language for which O'Connell had been prosecuted in 1833 or 1844. But it was received with nearly universal applause by the gentlemen of Ireland. Their pride was wounded by the liberal rhetorician's appeal to brute force ; which in essence did not differ from the language of Nicholas to the Poles or of Metternich to the Italians. Had the speech been prosecuted O'Brien would have reiterated and justified it. And he would have had the sympathy of his order; for if Ireland was living under the British constitution it was felt to be as improper to answer her demand for local government in these brutal terms, as to make such an answer to the contemporary demands of the Anti Corn Law League. But if she was not living under the British Constitution, if this foolhardy warning that she must not expect relief except when her neighbour was in the last extremity, expressed the settled purpose of the Empire, Irish gentlemen foresaw with consternation the consequences which would flow from such a fact. With what force it might be con- tended that to break away from such an unequal alliance was a plain right ; with what certainty men would desire that that last extremity, in which only they PEEL'S CONCESSIONS TO IRELAND. 653 would expect fair play, would speedily arise ? It is the duty of a statesman to teach nations that the claim of justice cannot honourably, and in the long run cannot safely, be resisted. To republican America and philo- sophic Germany, to France which had formulated the doctrines of public liberty, and Belgium which had fought for them, the proposal to reconsider the relations of two united countries and re-arrange them more conveniently, was a very moderate and rational project. But the mass of the English people have never been able to recognise any equity which countervails their interests, or alarms their pride. And this blind doltish obstinacy, Mr. Macaulay clothed in the vesture of rhetoric and eloquence. Like Peel he taught a lesson which rulers ought to be slow to teach, for nations are not slow to learn, the bitter lesson that the Irish people had a vital interest in the calamity and discomfiture of England.* A widely different feeling was excited by the action and language of Mr. Gladstone, a junior member of the Government at that time. He considered himself pre- cluded by past professions from supporting the measure * Mr. Macaulay seems always to have proceeded upon the assumption that justice is a luxury, like Bass's beer and Holloway's ointment, intended specially for British enjoyment. In his article on Milton in the Edinburgh Review, he says, " One part of the empire was so unhappily circumstanced that, at that time, its misery was necessary to our happiness, and its slavery to our freedom." This maxim describes his own policy in the reign of Queen Victoria as accurately as Cromwell's in the Commonwealth. It is as base a rule of conduct at bottom as any that can be picked out of Macchiavelli. It may be noted that whereas O'Connell has been assailed for teaching that " England's difficulty is Ireland's opportunity," Mr. Macaulay taught in this debate that England's greatest difficulty is Ire- land's only opportunity. Peel gallantly facing the prejudice of his partisans on that occasion to accomplish a public good, and Macaulay stimulating their blind rage for the benefit 01 party, is not a picture men of letters will recall with pleasure. 654 YOUNG IRELAND. in the suspected character of an official subordinate, but he resigned his office and supported it as an independent member. Not at all on the ground of restitution to the Catholics for their Church property the gift of six- pence or a shilling in the pound would be shabby from a debtor, but infamous from a robber to his victim but for its healing effects, and because those who paid the taxes of a country had a right to share the benefit of its institutions. The second reading was carried by a large majority and it passed through its subsequent stages and became law.* The Repeal members still attended Conciliation Hall in lieu of Palace Yard, and this preference was regarded with grave displeasure and alarm by the Whigs and by many of the Radicals. Mr. Hume, after having pri- vately remonstrated with O'Connell and O'Brien in vain,f gave notice of a call of the House to compel the attendance of the Irish members. The General Com- mittee took this menace into consideration and after careful deliberation resolved that the call ought to be disobeyed. Smith O'Brien, who was absent in the country, sent a prompt adhesion to this policy. " I will not," he wrote, " attend the call of the House with which Mr. Hume menaces us." Mr. John O'Connell echoed this language, and O'Connell went the length of contending that the House of Commons under the Act of Union had no power to enforce its orders in Ireland. For a moment a dangerous contest between an authority * The majority was 328 votes to 176. f Caherinoyle Correspondence. PEEL'S CONCESSIONS TO IRELAND. 655 which claimed to be supreme in the empire, and the Association which swayed opinion in Ireland, seemed imminent. But the Government did not choose to have their concessions embarrassed by this Opposition esca- pade, and on the day fixed for Mr. Hume's motion there was no House and it fell ignominiously to the ground.* * Mr. Hume was much censured in Ireland for becoming the cat's-paw of the Whigs upon this occasion. In 1837 when he was rejected by Middlesex and could not obtain a seat in his native country, he was elected for the city of Kilkenny without a penny of expense, beyond the postage of a letter announcing the fact, which in those days amounted to tenpence. It was always supposed in England that this seat had been procured for him by O'Connell, but in fact it was the spontaneous compliment of the reformers of Kilkenny led by Dr. Cane to a prominent English Reformer. His new constituents sent a deputation to London at their own cost to announce his election, and one of them afterwards assured me that Mr. Hume after listening to an address of congratulation with which they were charged, excused himself for a brief reply by informing them that his luncheon was waiting ; and bowed out his new friends without ceremony. This was the last deputation Kilkenny sent to a financial reformer. NOTE ON CHAPTER V. PEEI/S CONCESSIONS AND THE YOUNG IRELANDERS. Among the serious misconceptions and savage misrepresentations to which the writers of the Nation have been subjected in England from time to time, it is worth while in the interests of truth, to take notice of how their conduct in this business impressed a party journalist, opposed to the Government whose measures they welcomed. The Morning Chronicle, a Whig organ at that time, said " Notwithstanding irreconcilable differences of opinion with our Dublin contemporary the Nation and the Young Ireland of which it is the repre- sentative, we have long thought well of the spirit of political independence and earnestness observable in the conduct of both. That the Nation is not always civil, nor even decently just to the Whigs and ourselves, does not lessen the pleasure we have in acknowledging that it at least does some- thing to create in Ireland one of the things which Ireland most wants an independent public opinion. We have noted also with satisfaction, that on general questions of policy connected with the material and moral im- provement of Ireland this influential journal is fully as earnest as on 656 YOUNG IRELAND. Repeal itself. It shows no sneaking kindness for special grievances for the sake of their reaction or political discontent, and would we do believe cheerfully relinquish the finest grievance in the world without a thought of the political capital into which it might be improved. The tone of this important organ of Irish opinion has always been sound on the subject more particularly of education. It has not been backward on fit occasions to do ample and handsome justice to the system of primary schools established in 1831-2 although that system was the work of an Imperial legislature, and not only of an Imperial legislature but of a Whig cabinet, and not only a Whig cabinet in general but of Lord Stanley in particular. In the same spirit we are glad to see it go heart and hand with Mr. Wyse in his endeavours to press on Parliament and the Ministry the subject of improved and extended academical education. Young Ireland asks no question about Mr. Wyse's soundness in the Repeal faith, cheers him on all tainted as he is with the heresy of Imperialism, and is prepared to hope all things and thankfully accept any really good thing even from the Cabinet that wrongfully imprisoned Mr. O'Connell and Mr. Duffy." It may be noted that the policy pursued did not meet universal assent among the party. MacNevin, who was the most sensitive to opinion and the least able to stand alone, took alarm from the talk of his country neighbours that Repeal was to be sacrificed for these concessions, and was so disheartened by the ignorance of the Western peasantry that for a moment he was in despair. I find among his letters one from a friend who answered his objections and quieted his fear. " Touching Peel and O'Counell let me say, with the Duke, there was no compromise, there is no compromise, and there shall be no compromise. Peel may bid as high as he pleases, but he can bid nothing equivalent to what must be abandoned. Rest you easy in your rural groves and fear nothing on the score of a new Pacata Hibernia. I deny and repudiate your theory about the people. If they were all bred the serfs of Counaught squireens, their independence I mean their personal independence, their recognition of the fact that they are men with certain human powers and human rights would be distant. But you must not judge the people of Ireland by your present neighbours. Did you ever make a Jcaylie with an Ulster farmer ? He would puzzle you, I promise you, on any subject within his range ; on the Bible for example, or crops, or profit and loss (he is rather too wide-awake on the last point). Look at the Munster peasantry ; they have not the shrewdness of the Northerns, but they have a higher and manlier nature, more imagination, more sympathy, more self-denial. Remember that some of the best songs in the Spirit were written by Munster peasants in intervals of their daily labour. You find selfish and barbarous notions about Repeal among the people. To be sure. Do you think the Barons at Runnyniede knew any higher meaning for liberty than privileges and immunities to be enjoyed by themselves? They wanted free- holds like the poor Conuaught men, and had as little sense of abstract right or wrong. Trust me 'tis a sense which has to be sedulously cultivated and by no means grows wild. But why don't you plant Reading Rooms among them ? It would be pleasanter employment, to my thinking, than interchanging hospitalities with the Squire Ulicks and Squire Anthonys of the West." CHAPTER VI. THE WORKSHOP OF YOUNG IRELAND. As Peel's second proposal led to serious controversy, which, in the end compelled the young men to confront the greatest tribune of modern times in the arena where he had long been supreme, it will be convenient, before describing it, to take note of the work in which they were engaged at that time. Notwithstanding the stealthy attempts to injure them they pursued their policy with unflagging industry. The Eighty-two Club, projected, during the imprisonment, was now founded. The design was to bring the intelligence rank and wealth of the national party into one centre, and to open a door to adherents who on various grounds held aloof from the Association.* Lord Cloncurry was the first recruit of this class who justified their hopes. The express object was to encourage Irish art and literature, and to diffuse a national feeling through society, and its chief means to accustom Catholics and Protestants to act together. An expensive uniform, and * O'Connell did not conceal from himself the necessity of offering this alternative. In the Association (Jan. 25th) speaking of the Club he said "The prejudice which existed against the Repeal Association, would not exist against it." Q Q 658 YOUNG IRE LAX D. a strict ballot, rendered it somewhat too exclusive in its character, but in the end it answered its purpose by be- coming practically a muster of the national leaders of the present and the future. O'Connell was President, and of the five Vice-Presidents three were Protestants ; of the two secretaries one was a Protestant, and at its public meetings the resolutions were generally proposed and seconded by a Protestant and a Catholic. Its first public banquet was held at the Rotunda on the 16th of April, the sixty-third anniversary of the day upon which Grattan moved the Declaration of Independence. Up- wards of a hundred gentlemen, many of them men of name and mark, arrayed in native green, destined as they believed some day to become the official uniform of a national government, and a national army, sat round the board. They included the most conspicuous na- tionalists in Parliament, at the Bar, among the gentry and in the municipalities, and some who were destined to become conspicuous in the approaching future. Among the latter were Thomas Francis Meagher, John Mitchel, T. B. McManus, John Martin and P. J. Smyth, who had not yet written spoken or acted under the public eye ; who, except in one or two instances, did not know each other, or the comrades with whom they were soon to be associated in life and death ; but who were drawn by an irresistible gravitation to the new centre of action. Only one member was excused from appear- ing in uniform, the venerable Cornelius McLoughlen who had borne arms among the Volunteers when the historic events occurred which the Club was founded to THE WORKSHOP OF YOUNG IRELAND. 659 commemorate. Over the president's chair hung Kenny's picture of the Irish Parliament on the night when Grattan rose to proclaim it a free and sovereign legisla- ture, crowded with the portraits of the men of Eighty- two. Flags symbolising the past and the future of Ireland were distributed throughout the hall, and the presence of nearly three hundred ladies gave to the striking scene its final grace and triumph. Among the toasts was " The Memory of Grattan and Flood," angry rivals in life but reunited in the love of the people whom they served; and it was pleasant to hear the son and namesake of Henry Grattan declare that his father had drunk the divine draught of liberty from the fountain of living water of which Flood was the guardian. Molyneux, Swift and Lucas, the forerunners of Flood and Grattan, were fitly commemorated. MacNevin, who proposed their memory, read from their career the lesson that persecution or defeat does not render the life of the patriot useless ; at worst he sows the seed of happier days. As the midnight hour approached, and the com- pany began to separate, Davis was called upon to pro- pose a toast connected with the Arts in Ireland. He had rarely made a set speech in public ; the late hour, the exhaustion of the company after an exciting day, and the triteness of the topic, made his friends who had pressed him into the position, anxious and nervous. But a voice vibrating with sincerity and conviction arrested the company already beginning to separate ; they gathered round him with the silent rapt attention, which is the orator's greatest triumph, and remained to Q Q 2 660 YOUNG IRELAND. the close, impatient at missing a word. Next day one of his friends who had watched the scene with critical care, assured him that he might count on success as an orator, as authentic as that which he had won as a poet and a thinker. But the new organisation involved one grave danger, which no prudence could altogether evade. If it opened its doors to the disreputable tail of the old association it would plainly miss its aim, for it was they who frightened away the class whom it was founded to enlist ; and if it refused to admit them, it was sure to create bitter and deadly enmities. Lane who was then in Cork wrote to Davis insisting on this latter danger. " Fm sorry that I can't have a talk with you on the subject, as I must confess I do not at all understand the Eighty Two Club. I fancied at first that I had some glimmering of its meaning-, but I thought that the means adopted were altogether inadequate, and inappropriate to secure the end in view. I fancied it was to make Repeal genteel, which I do not consider of any value, even if it were possible ; to turn Hercules into an Antinous, and teach him to wield his club gracefully is I think an idle task. Let Repealers be strong and earnest and they may be as ungraceful as they will ; it is better have them clench their teeth and knit their brows, than smile with elegance. It would be impos- sible to form a large body of Repealers who have what may be called ' position in society/ If you can form a star of them so much the better, but where do you draw the line of distinction between the nucleus of aristocracy and the nebulous mass of shabby gentility which surrounds it ? Begin with Lord French, Sir Richard Musgrave, Smith O'Brien, and the members of Parliament exclude (M. N.) he is indignant; admit him well, exclude (O. P.) and he is outrageous ; or admit him and THE WORKSHOP OF YOUNG IRELAND. 661 you must admit (X. Y. Z.) * and so on Tintil you include every man who can borrow a guinea and get tick from his tailor or else you cause dissension. You thus either miss your proposed object, or do worse, divide your party. No ! You should have got up a good club, like the Kildare Street, where a man could not complain if he were rejected ; or you should have had i\ society of some sort like what you once proposed to Lefanu for the Young Ireland of both parties, into which men of all opinions would be admitted ; or you should deluge Royal Irish Academies, and Royal Dublin Societies, and every old institution with Re- pealers. You may make the great body of the Protestants at present swallow Nationality, but you cannot make them gulp down Repeal, or as they believe it to be, O'Connellism. If they become national 'tis all we want; the rest will follow as sure as the fruit follows the flower you must have a spring and a summer before you have an autumn. " I had another idea about the '82 Club, that it might be turned into a National Convention the method in which the men were admitted at the first ballot puts this out of the question. It was very injudicious to have such a flourish of trumpets at its foundation, and such trivial rules coming immediately after. [Rules as to uniform, entrance fee, &c.] There was a good deal of the old Irish fanfaronade about it which I hoped was dying out amongst us. In Cork the people in general have a great hatred of uniforms ; the town Councillors and Aldermen here could not be got to wear robes. This I think principally arises from the morbidly keen sense of the ludicrous which Cork men generally possess. Tom Steele could not live a week in Cork/' Searching criticism like this from observant friends generally came to temper whatever project the party undertook. The attempt to nationalise art had been only moderately successful. From the beginning some of us held that all we could accomplish was to replace * In the original letter names not symbols are employed. 662 YOUNG IRELAND. the rude and sometimes indecent daubs which were to be found in the humblest lodging and in the poorest cabin, by lithographs and wood engravings carefully drawn and presenting scenes of historic or traditional interest.* Davis had hoped for much more, but one of his personal friends, the most gifted of the resident artists in Ireland, who loved the man more than he shared his opinions, dissipated this hope. " How to answer your question regarding- the nationalising of art," he wrote, " I hardly know, but I fear certain hundreds of pounds will never produce either art or nationality. Indeed the measure of success the Parliamentary Committee have attained in their praiseworthy endeavours in England, is a sufficient com- mentary upon such a mode of attempting the end sought. You should give Ireland first a decided national school of poetry that is song and the other phases will soon show themselves. This I must allow is being done but the effect is not yet com- plete. You know that this mode is the only possible one, as well as I do, but you have lurking hopes that things can be forced. Ah my dear friend free spiritual high-aiming art cannot be forced. Some great passion some earnest and all unworldly feeling some profound state of thought, something that, whilst * " I wish mnch that you ccmld get something done by the Repeal Association towards providing good prints, very cheap for the poor. I observe in almost every cottage where absolute destitution does not exist, a disposition to hang up prints on the walls. Generally they are wretched productions having neither grace nor truth. Could we not induce some competent artist to give us lithograph sketches which could be circulated through hawkers and pedlars at a low price ? Religious subjects appear to be the most popular military come next. Temperance prints also are not uncommon. It would be well to invite proposals with a view to see what sort of artists we should be able to get. I wish that the Reformed Corporation would take upon themselves to found picture galleries in the Town Halls of the several towns. If each Corporation in the kingdom would order from some Irish artist one picture each year, what great and immediate encouragement would be given to Irish art. So also with sculpture. The present appears to me to be a very favourable moment for such a suggestion." Davis's Papers. O'Brien to Davis, Aug. 3, '45. THE WORKSHOP OF YOUNG IRELAND. 663 making this material universe the scene, and its material offspring 1 the actors, shall yet reach at what is far above and beyond it all something of this kind alone will extricate the lightning flash ' from the black cloud that bound it/ And would you seek any less than the highest ? but I blunder, for I cannot admit any- thing less to be art at all. . . The Germans have a school of art but they have one of poetry, eminently German too therefore eminently original. The English have no truly English school of poetry (although they have had great the greatest poets) consequently no truly English art, at least beyond a certain reach in landscapes ; why is all this ? The Germans have, to go back farther, a school of philosophy, even as the Greeks had, and the medieval Italians mingled in all three with their deepest religious faith. It is from this that issued all the rays that, combining, made one brilliant and consistent flow of vivifying light. When England can unveil such a sun when Ireland can rub her eyes clear of short-sighted means and petty, and too often selfish, ends, then shall the irresistible influence, the wel- comed law of art, proceed also from them as from new centres." But it is through the discipline of failure that permanent success is oftenest won, and they undertook other work which had a speedy and complete success ; work by which they are most affectionately remembered at present, and will probably be longest remembered in the future. They determined to make a careful attempt to fill up certain obvious gaps in the national literature. The most urgent want was an adequate history of Ire- land. Among a library of books labelled histories there was not one which could be put with credit into the hands of a stranger, or a student. Jeffrey Keating's big volume, which is a congeries of dull fables relieved by some glimmering of traditional truth, only comes down 664 YOUNG IRELAND. to the period of the English Invasion. Dr. Leland is prejudiced and meagre, relieved by such stinted fairness as a professor of Trinity College and viceregal chaplain in the reign of George III. might venture to exhibit, and he only comes down to the Treaty of Limerick. Plowden is Leland rewritten, compressed, liberalised, and supplemented by original documents. Moore stops at the beginning of the Reformation, and his first volume is overloaded with worthless antiquarian essays. MacGeoghegan's history, a faithful and honest book, was written in France, and in French, was clumsily trans- lated, and closes at the termination of the Williamite wars. O'Connell's " Memoir of Ireland " did not pre- tend to be a history, but only a skilful brief of the case against England ; and Moore's Captain Eock (a pleasant jeu d' esprit] is not a narrative but a com- mentary, and a commentary not free from that soupqon of contempt for Ireland, which after the fashion of Sydney Smith and the Edinburgh Review, was con- sidered essential to get justice and common sense on the subject, a hearing in England. A generation earlier Shelley, then a boyish enthusiast, made a mission to Dublin to preach the policy of Ireland breaking away from the Union, and this want struck him so painfully that he contributed a liberal sum to procure the pub- lication of a national history ; but unfortunately the result was a rhetorical pamphlet of no weight or authority.* And now in 1844 another generous * D. F. McCarthy's " Early Days of Shelley." The book he promoted is known as Lawless' History of Ireland ; John Lawless being a fluent and effective popular orator in those days. THE WORKSHOP OF YOUNG IRELAND. 665 Englishman, Dr. Smiles, wrote a serviceable handbook of Irish transactions, marred only by a stranger's necessary ignorance of the relative importance and historical perspective of events. The void still re- mained to be filled and the Repeal Association offered a prize for a competent book for schools and students. Davis, who had only moderate trust in the effect of prizes, was disposed to relinquish his work in the Nation for twelve months, and write a history himself. MacNevin was fired with the same ambition, and began to study the materials ; but it was a task for which he had no natural aptitude, and he had to learn laboriously facts which were as familiar to Davis as the days of the week. Davis sought to enlist a friend, to whom he had recourse in every literary emergency ; he besought Maddyn to do the work : " I undertook to write a History of Ireland from the Treaty of Limerick to 1829, or such other period (earlier or later) in this century as I thought fit. The work was to be issued in parts, and then in a volume of six or seven hundred octavo pages. For this I was offered 300, and 100 more if it succeeded. Now I have not written a page of this. I could not write it well without leaving to other men political duties which are every day becoming more weighty and solemn. You would write the ' history of such a time, abounding in civil events, parties and characters, infinitely better than I could, even had I the utmost leisure. It is most desirable for Ireland that you should live in, and write for it. Will you then seriously deliberate on this ? If the authorship of ' Ireland and its Rulers ' do not interfere with the success of the Grattan [he had edited Grattan's speeches] , I assume James Duffy will give you at least 300 for a book which will be better than I could have given him, and which 666 YOUNG IRELAND. your literary repute will serve more than my political connexions could. Consider then whether this sum would pay you, and whether your mind would not be better and happier at home here than in the brick desert of London. As however the British Museum has many materials, you might write most, or all, in London if you preferred it." In the end the design was put on a more practical footing ; it was agreed to write the history in eras, and entrust it to as many competent writers as could be procured. The success of the shilling volumes issued by Lord Brougham suggested the application of the same method and machinery to the diffusion of Irish books, and I proposed to my friends a series of shilling volumes of biography poetry and criticism to be called the " Library of Ireland," in which the historical design might be carried out. They took up the project eagerly. MacNevin wrote the first volume, the " Irish Volunteers," and Davis in the midst of a hundred engagements set to work upon a memoir of Wolfe Tone, whom he esteemed one of the greatest Irishmen of the eighteenth century ; Father Meehan wrote the tragic story of the Confederation of Kilkenny ; other friends followed, and a volume issued every month for nearly two years, till a fatal conflict with O'Connell diverted their energy into fresh channels. The little books had an immediate success, and after the lapse of a generation, when the writers for the most part are dead, new editions constantly issue from the press of Ireland and America. In the year 1880 the fortieth edition of some of the volumes is current, and more than a THE WORKSHOP OF YOUNG IRELAND. 667 quarter of a million of copies of the more popular books have been circulated wherever the English tongue is spoken. The Memoirs of Francis Jeffrey and of Miss Mitford and the miscellanies of Leigh Hunt enable us to estimate the impression they created among the critical class in England, never too friendly to Irish experiments. Scholars and critics have followed who may smile at the hasty generalities, and ill -digested facts which sometimes passed for history in these little books ; but it must always be confessed that the writers opened a mine shut up for two centuries and a half, and taught their successors where the precious ore might be found.* And one at least of the workmen has never relinquished his task. When his friends were dead or exiled, and the country torpid, he still bestowed upon Ireland books which in happier days will class him with MacGeoghegan, Lanigan, and O'Connor, the patriot priests who continued in adverse times the pious work begun in the monastery of Donegal. I find among the letters addressed to MacNevin at this time one which will exhibit the sort of discipline to which the young men subjected each other, that they might become skilful soldiers, and be able to stand fire before the enemy. ' ' Three editions of the ' Volunteers ' in a few weeks, and a fourth on the stocks, is a great triumph. I have read the last * The Library of Ireland has often, and very naturally been attributed to Davis, who originated so much. But this design and the conduct of it to the end, belonged wholly to one far less capable of turning it to account. Respecting Davis's projected Life of Wolfe Tone, see Note at the end of the chapter. 668 YOUNG IRELAND. as carefully as you wished, and I set down suggestions for the next edition as they occur to me. " 1. Take your name from the preface. It is in the two preceding- pages, (viz., the title page and the dedication) and, in the new edition, to the new preface. The four Thomas MacNevins in four consecutive pages constitute an aggregate meeting which in my opinion ought to be dispersed. " 2. Page 28, for ' Tyrone ' write ' Hugh O'Neill ;' and put in a note ' The great Earl of Tyrone, properly Aodh O'Neill.'' It is so he is spoken of in Irish Annals, and thus people will be able to identify him with Mitchells hero, when Mitchel's book appears. "3. Page 29. < O'Neill was attainted/ What O'Neill? there were several rather eminent men of the name at that time. Shane I presume is intended ; but you must specify. " 4. Same page. ( His inherited territories of Down and Antrim.' No Irish chief at that period inherited his terri- tories ; he was elected to them ; and one of our complaints against the English is that they dealt with the property of the clan by forfeiture as if it were inherited by the chief ; which it was not any more than the Lord Mayor inherits the Mansion House. Moreover Down and Antrim certainly were not his territories inherited or acquired. You must have fallen into some error here. " 5. Page 43. ' There was no virtue too pure, no patriotism too generous/ Are these fitting terms to apply to the opposi- tion in question ? Is it wholly improbable that he would have lauded the Wood scheme to the skies if it had been proposed by St. John or Harley ? "6. Page 74. ' Now for the first time a people sprung to life.' Was it the first time, my friend ? and were the Volun- teers the Irish people ? Shade of Roger O'Moore and Patrick Sarsfield forgive you. "7. At page 115 you determine the number of the Volunteers to be fifty thousand, yet you afterwards repeatedly speak of them as a hundred thousand for example at p. 146, and p. 153, and p. 191. THE WORKSHOP OF YOUNG IRELAND. 669 " 8. Page 125. ' Rebellion and conspiracy/ Pray transpose the words. Don't men conspire first and rebel afterwards ? " 9. Page 192. Where you mention Lord Kenmaft you ought to state that he was a Catholic Peer, without which intimation English readers will be slow to understand what follows. "These suggestions are worth little or nothing, but they give me a claim upon you to read my volume next month as assiduously, with a similar purpose. Davis will be busy for three weeks on Wolfe Tone, during which time pray send a literary paper in addition to your political article as often as you can." Sir Colman O'Loglilen promised me his aid, and pro- jected two books, neither of which unfortunately was afterwards written. But his design may stimulate some lawyer of a later generation to undertake the relinquished task. " We propose to begin with the first volume of The Bench and the Bar of Ireland. The series will probably run to two or three volumes. We of course exclude all living men, and have divided the subject between us. I take the earlier and O'Donohue the later portion. The series includes sketches of Sir John Davies, Sir Richard Bolton, Patrick Darcy, C. J. Keatinge, Sir Toby Butler, C. J. Whitshed, Anthony Malone, Lord Avonmore, Hussey Burgh, Lord Clonmel, Curran, &c. " With respect to the work in which I have no fellow labourer the Legal History of Ireland I canuot promise a volume till about September, 1840. I purpose to go back to the remotest times to that of the Brehon law, and the customs and tenures of ancient Ireland the introduction and gradual pro- gress of the Anglo-Norman law the legislation of the parlia- ments of the Pale the rise and history of the present Courts of Justice the history of the Castle Chamber of the Courts of Presidency of Munster and Connaught, &c., and to bring down the history of Irish legislation, social political and com- mercial (as far as can be done in an historical and not a technical work), to the Revolution of 180U. This will consequently giva me a great deal to do/' 670 YOUNG IRELAND. Though a knowledge of Ireland was first insisted upon, the teaching of the young men was not narrow or insular. Among work begun at this time were a series of critical papers on the English poets, and on Con- tinental literature, accounts of Colonial and Foreign legislatures, historical essays on obscure or misunder- stood eras, popular summaries of political science, essays 011 national sports, and retrospective reviews of the best Irish books in history, fiction and the drama. The number of books published in Dublin, coloured with the new national sentiment, continued to excite the wonder of English critics. Many of them were poor and temporary, but some were of permanent interest. Carleton wrote, as a feuitteton for the Nation, a story of landlord tyranny which outgrew the limits of a news- paper and became the most successful of his novels. Dr. Madden in his " Connection between the Kingdom of Ireland and the Crown of England " furnished original and important materials for Irish history ; and even Lever made the experiment of a story founded on the wrongs and sufferings of the peasantry ; the first and last of its class in all his writings.* * Carleton's story was " Valentine McClutchy," Lever's " St. Patrick's Eve." In London Mr. Marmion Savage, clerk of the Privy Council, and a writer in the Examiner, published a novel entitled " The Falcon Family or Young Ireland; " John Pigot under the title of " Tigemach Mac Morris," being the hero of the story, which was a long and rather feeble pasquinade. The books projected by the Young Irelanders were nearly all published by Mr. James Duffy. He was originally a bookseller on a small scale, in an obscure street, dealing chiefly in reprints of religious publications, but his enterprise and liberality carried him into a wider field and ultimately created a trade extending to India, America and Australia. The Spirit of the Nation was issued in the first instance from the Nation office, but as the demand for it became embarrassing I looked out for a publisher and fixed upon Mr. James Duffy. This was the beginning of his connection with THE WORKSHOP OF YOUNG IRELAND. 671 Davis was an indefatigable worker on a settled plan of work, and did not waste an atom of his power on show of any sort. His notes to his friends bear the same relation to his published writings that hasty scratches in a painter's note-book bear to the glowing canvas. With his comrades whom he saw daily there was little need for correspondence, but to Smith O'Brien who resided much in the country, he wrote often, and in his brief notes we get not only an insight into his own life but a striking picture of the energy and diligence of the party. It was proposed to erect in Limerick an equestrian statue of the skilful soldier who defended the city against William III., and Davis was eager that the work might be entrusted to a competent artist. " What of Sarsfield's statue ? " (he writes to O'Brien) " I the Young Ireland party. He was a man of shrewd sense and sly humour, but without cultivation, or judgment in literature, and it was a subject of constant vexation to the men who were making his name familiar to the world, that side by side with books of eminent merit, he would issue some dreadful abortion of an Irish story or an Irish pamphlet which was certain to be treated at a distance as the latest production of Young Ireland ! It is impossible to read even now without mingled amusement and sympathy, the explosions of wrath over these shortcomings which found vent in their private correspondence at that time. On one occasion the writer of a book of careful thought and great research had promised an early copy to an eminent English critic to be sent through one of Duffy's London agents. It did not arrive in due course and the critic caused an application to be made to the agent in question. The agent was a woman, keeping a news- paper shop, near a Catholic chapel, for the regular trade did not circulate Duffy's books till he established in later years a branch in Paternoster Row, and she sent the critic back his own note refolded and unstamped with a notification on the blank sheet that she knew nothing of Mr. So- and-So or his book. The critic sent his note and its endorsement to the author, with what result I may leave to the imagination of readers familiar with the irritabile genus. It was a standing joke somewhat later that the publisher had made a just and successful criticism at the expense of D'Arcy McGee. McGee described the hero of some national legend as having hair black and glossy as the wing of a young raven. " Why " says Mr. Duffy, with a sly smile, " when I was a boy the wing of a young raven was grey ; but 'tis long ago, and I suppose they have altered since then." 672 YOUNG IRELAND. think Moore would like to do it. [Christopher Moore who had made effective busts of Curran and Plunket, but proved on trial to be unequal to statues.] Kirk is not competent. The Ballad Poetry [second volume of the new Library of Ireland] has reached a real third edition, and cannot be printed fast enough for the sale. It is every way good. Not an Irish Conservative of education but will read it, and be brought nearer to Ireland by it. That is a propagandism worth a thousand harangues such as you ask me to make. We are going to print (Torrens) McCullaglr's Lecture on History and O'Donovan's Essays on Irish names and families in the series. Hugh O'Neill's life is written, and is admirably done. One of the volumes will be l Thomond and the O'Briens/ dedicated to a living member of that clan, written by a Clare man of Con- servative family, but this is a secret known only to you, to the author, and to myself. I have little chance of getting from town. Still I am in iron health. Many thanks for your kind invitation to Cahermoyle. Grey Porter is here, he is unchanged."* And again " Grey Porter is here, full of projects and ambition. . . . Here are two projects for you to digest. First and nearest is to put you, John O'Connell, Duffy and five or six more on the committee of the library in D'Olier Street [the Dublin Library] at the coming election in February. It has thirteen thousand volumes, a noble and well situated house and only wants vigour and control to be a great civic library and literary institute. Porter is at work for his Polytechnic in connection with the Mechanics' Institutes, but that will be for mechanics and prac- tical science. Secondly a solemn meeting of Irish M.P/s, corporators, &c. to discuss and issue a Declaration of Irish grievances, rights and remedies. By a little diplomacy we might get through this without quarrel or illegality. . . But * Cahermoyle Correspondence. THE WORKSHOP OF YOUNG IRELAND. 073 these things should be considered and done by three or four men and not spoken of till all was To the first note O'Brien replied : " I cannot but hope that the publication of the monthly volume will be of infinite value to the national cause if the intellectual and moral standard of the work can be kept as high as it ought to be. I like the two first numbers very much I could not lay down the Ballads until I had read the whole volume. I am delighted with the article in yesterday's Nation respecting the prospect of an union between Orange and Green. It makes me for a moment believe that the dream of my life is about to.be realised. I know that I could not recommend [in the Association] that a few hundred copies of this number of the Nation should be sent into the Orange districts without awakening jealousies which it is very unadvisable to raise ; but I think it worth while the consideration of you and Duffy, whether it would not be well to print this article on separate slips of paper, and send them by post into the heart of Fer- managh. Glorious indeed would be the spectacle of an union of the two great contending Irish parties, who have been taught to hate each other." Davis's share of the work he projected was commonly to do half of it, and revise the other half. Here is an example. He wrote to O'Brien "Either you or I, or some one should compile a short account of the geography, history and statistics of Ireland, to be printed in fifty or sixty pages of a report, accompanied by a map and circulated extensively. We must do more to educate the people. That is the only moral force in which I have any faith. Mere agitation is either bullying or preparation for war. I condemn the former, others of the party condemn the latter. But we all * Cahenuoyle Correspondence. This latter project became in the end a Levee on the anniversary of the Richmond Imprisonment. R R 674 YOUNG IRELAND. agree in the policy of education. . . The members of the Fran- chise committee should apply themselves, under your guidance, to the Grand Juries. I suppose we shall be able to work up some account of the Customs, Excise, and Post-office from Stritch's and Reynolds' reports. We should get Mr. Mullin to make a report of the Poor Law Commission and its working. I shall make up the Education and Police as soon as the Estimates Report is out. Dillon and I have agreed to prepare facts, &c. on (land) tenures (Irish and foreign) . Thus I think we are on the way of having proper materials for a statistical account of Ireland both internally and in relation to the British Empire." * Dillon, who at the moment was on circuit, reported that his share of the joint task was not neglected, and described his first experiment as an advocate in terms which will help the reader to understand his modest manly character. " The best course I can pursue in the execution of this task is to draw up a report setting forth succinctly the law of Land- lord and Tenant, to be submitted immediately after my arrival in Dublin, and then with your assistance undertake a second, which will comprehend all the other branches of the subject, foreign tenures, changes to be suggested, &c. Perhaps it would be better not to bring any report before the committee until our labours are completed, and then give the entire result together. If I acquired any fame at Castlebar I owe it all to the unblushing mendacity of my good friends the reporters. My speech was very weak and I would be very much dissatisfied with myself if I had not the justification of its being a first speech to a jury, and made without even one "minute to think of what I was to say. I am very much pleased at the way Barry is going on, his speeches were both exceedingly good but particularly the first. Was not that a capital story he told about Sir Charles Napier, ( At them you rascals, and fulfil the prophecies/ '' ^* Cahennoyle Correspondence. THE WORKSHOP OF YOUNG IRELAND. 675 In another of Dillon's notes one may learn how the " ferocious hatred of the Saxon " with which the party have sometimes been credited, found expression in the private correspondence of its leaders. Their public censure of England was moderate compared to the reproaches which the philosopher David Hume dis- charged on that nation a propos of its injustice to Scotland ; and was gracious courtesy compared to the habitual language of English writers respecting Ireland; and their private correspondence was more temperate and considerate than their public censure. " You are going on gloriously in the Nation. There is one hint which as an impartial spectator I would be disposed to give, and that is, not to be guilty of incivility to Saxon sympathisers. Speaking fairly I think they have treated us very well, and it would not be handsome to repay kindness even from them with ferocity and abuse. This hint was suggested not by anything I saw in the Nation, which I think has not gone one inch too far in that direction, but by some observations in the Freeman pre- facing a review of Venedey's book, extracted from the Chronicle. To assail all parties in England with indiscriminate abuse would be to follow up the blunders of O'Connell with respect to the Chartists. This then is the sum total of my preachment, to denounce vigorously all approaches towards compromise, but at the same time to speak with all respect and civility of those who stretch out the hand of friendship to us ; and not to scrutinize too narrowly the motives of their friendship so long as they tender it unencumbered by conditions/' * * Davis Papers. Dillon to Davis Ballaghaderrin, March 21. MacNeviii wrote in the same spirit : " We are not animated by any malig- nant hatred of England and the English. No such thing. We saw revived in the glory of that great country more than the power of Imperial Rome. We recognised in her institutions the most formidable social system the- world ever saw great in arms, illustrious in arts, in science, and in litera- R R 2 676 YOUNG IRELAND. If the fate of nations depends 011 the education of the young, Davis and his friends were engaged in 110 ignoble task. A generous Englishman, Arnold of Rugby, once conceived the project of removing to Ireland and taking pupils in a country where there was " more to be done than in any corner of the world." The basis of his system, as of Davis's, was that " Ireland was **. distinct nation, entitled to govern herself."' English- men may meditate with advantage on the problem whether a task, which would be recognised as heroic in a stranger, was unbecoming men of the Irish race. To another of his friends, Denny Lane, Davis con- stantly opened his inmost mind on the transactions of the hour. Before the close of the imprisonment, he said : " Your stubborn resolve to better Cork, whether it likes it or not, is a great comfort to me. Stability, morals, and hard work they'd better hell and make purgatory a paradise. ... If there be a war now [with France], we must carry Repeal in six months ; otherwise in three or four years, if we do our duty." And somewhat later : " I learn that the best men in Cork wish to make you their representative. Our idea here was to work for your return for Mallow, but Cork is far better. . I assume that both Murphy and Callaghan go out. . . . Whom do you propose to start ? You and Hayes would do famously. Amongst your other duties you are to have charge of our most brilliant and kindly, but as yet head-long friend MacNevin. All our party are most anxious ture ; unlimited in empire, unbounded in the range of its power but we saw in her too the malignant influences under which our national honour, our national glory, our national prosperity withered, drooped, and died." * Stanley's " Life of Arnold." THE WORKSHOP OF YOUNG IRELAND. 677 to see you in the House. They are pressing me to go in, but I am positive against it. Some men of great powers are already girding their loins and there is some prospect now of a good band of National M.P's. . . . We miss you much at our evening meetings which have grown more serious." And after Peel's concession was announced : " I am- weary wishing you here. The events as to Maynooth will greatly weaken our enemies; and Oregon promises well, though I trust nothing to it. For our hopes' sake do not let Cork be guilty of any meanness should the Queen come. This should be easy in Cork, here it will be harder; but we are resolute and timely and cannot fail; so her coming shall be turned to good. Why don't you write more songs ? Your last to the air of ' The Foggy Dew ' was beautiful, and cornes constantly on my recollection like a southern twilight. I have nearly recovered the cold winter and Repeal essays [he was one of the judges whose duty it was to read a long series of Prize Essays on Repeal] but have too many things to do, and so my life is a string of epigrams which displeases me, I am left too much without affections; but I am coldly happy and dutiful. Duffy is well as a man can be who sees his young wife dying by inches. Barry and the rest of the set well and more serious than they used to be." He engaged Maddyn's aid to make Clarance Mangan better known to the lovers of poetry in England ; but unsuccessfully : " I think you were a reader of the University Magazine. If so, you must have noticed the ' Anthologia Germanica/ ( Leaflets from the German Oak/ ' Oriental Nights/ and other transla- tions, and apparent translations by Clarance Mangan. He had some small salary in the College Library, and has to support himself and his mother. His health is wretched. Charles Duffy is most anxious to have the papers I have described printed in London, for which they are better suited than for Dublin. Now, 678 YOUNG IRELAND. you will greatly oblige me by asking Newby if he will publish them,, giving Mangan j50 for the edition. If he refuse, you can say that Charles Duffy will repay him half the 50, should the work be a failure. Should he still declare against it, pray let me know soon what would be the best way of getting some payment and publication for Mangan's papers. Many of the ballads are Mangan's own, and are firstrate. Were they on Irish subjects he would be paid for them here. They ought to succeed in London nigh as well as the ' Prout Papers/ '' In liis notes to me at this time I find a just and graphic estimate of the books and men of the Com- monwealth era in Ireland, likely to be still useful to students : " Carte was an Ormondite and a Whig-Tory. Leland only copies Carte. Castlehaven and most of the other men acted feebly and sometimes falsely. They were half Englishmen. Owen supported the ultra men who wanted to ' cut the painter ' and thought foreign help could be best got in the name of Catholicity. He was no bigot. When a chance of getting inde- pendence by an alliance with the Puritans offered he seized it. The furious rascality of the English Parliament alone baulked him. He was the only general (as distinct from a guerilla officer) on the Irish side, during the war. I do not reckon Ormond or Murrough O'Brien as on the Irish side, though they sometimes appeared so. Ormond was a time-serving avaricious hard-disciplined man. Owen was just, brave, ener- getic, a keeper of promises, a merciful enemy, a stern leader who was loved, feared and trusted by his own, and dreaded and respected by his foes. Carte himself says all this. He was the Wolfe Tone of his time. The just and thorough man to whom victory would have been complete success/' And an estimate of a notable book, which will interest another class : " I read some forty pages of this ' Feslus ' and return it to THE WORKSHOP OF YOUNG IRELAND. 679 avoid reading more. It is a marvellous anatomy of soul with a sunbeam for a lancet, but I don't want theories ; I have had too much of them, and of grief the latter chiefly at my own short- comings. But there are dishonoured truths (such as that scorn of repentance) m the book, and when I have a longer leisure I'll ask you for it again." In 1843 the Repeal Association had superseded Parliament ; the new literature began visibly to super- sede the platform in 1845. NOTES ON CHAPTER VI. THE LIBRARY OP IRELAND. In the Library of Ireland the issue continued unbroken till public events interrupted it. The History of the Yoluuteers by MacNevin, was followed by the Ballad Poetry of Ireland by Gavan Duffy, the third volume on the list was a Life of Wolfe Tone by Thomas Davis, for which had to be substituted, under tragic circumstances, the Life of Aodh O'Neill by John Mitchel a new recruit at that time. These were succeeded by memoirs of Irish writers by McCarthy, and Darcy Magee another recent recruit, a national story by Carleton, a History of the American Revolu- tion by Michael Dboheny, Collections of Song's and Ballads by Barry and McCarthy and a History of the Confederation of Kilkenny by the Reverend Charles Meehan who has since cultivated historical investigation with such notable results. Among volumes announced but never published were The Rebellion of 1798 by M. J. Barry, the French Revolution by David Cangley, the History of Irish Manufactures by John Gray, History of " the Great Popish Rebellion " (1641) by Charles Gavan Duffy. The Nation not only interpreted to the people and popularised these works but supplemented them by others in the same spirit. At the opening of the New Tear a series of papers was announced and immediately commenced which sufficiently indicated the nature and character of the education which its writers aimed to give the people. This was the list of Nation essays : I. Sketches of Distinguished Irish Soldiers, Statesmen, Ecclesiastics, Artists and Authors. II. Papers on the Study of the Irish Language. III. A Series of Critical Articles on Continental Literature. IV. Historical Essays on memorable or obscure Periods of our National History. V. Popular Summaries of the Principles and Facts of Political Science. YI. A series of Critical Papers on the great English Poets. VII. Biographical and Critical Essays upon obscure writers of merit. 680 YOUNG IRELAND. YIIT. On Popular and National Sport?. IX. On the social, moral and intellectual condition of the Labouring Classes with suggestions for their improvement. X. Retrospective Reviews of the leading Irish Books in history, fiction and the drama intended as a guide to students and popular reading rooms. XI. Translations from the Irish. XII. Accounts of Colonial and Continental Legislatures. XIII. The Contemporary History of Europe. XIV. Sketches of Modern Revolutions, France, Belgium. Canada, Greece, &e. DAVIS'S LIFE OP WOLFE TONE. This last book on which he was employed illustrates Davis's method of working. He drew out a scheme of the whole volume, distributed it into chapters, which were in effect eras, entered the chapters in a blank book, and made notes under each heading as suitable thoughts arose from reading or reflection. He set to work at the same time to collect living authorities. There were still in Ireland men who had seen Tone, there were traditions of him afloat in various places, and an authentic and unpublished portrait in Dublin, widely different I understand from the feeble face sketched by his daughter-in-law. Those to whom the subject is familiar will read with interest this scheme of the book which I found among his papers. " LIFE OF THEOBALD WOLFE TONE. Chapter I. Tone's Boyhood. 1763 to 1780. II. T. C. D. Marriage and Projects. 1781 to 1789. III. Political apprenticeship. 1790-91. IV. Founds the II. I. (United Irishmen). 1791. V. Secretaiy of the Catholics. 1792-3. VI. A Traitor. 1794 VII. An Exile. 1794-5. VIII. Ambassador in France. 1796. IX. Hoche's Expedition, Tone in Bantry Bay. 1796. X. Daendaels. 1797-8. XI. Tone's last Voyage. 1798. XII. Trial and Death. 1798. XIII. Tone's Legacies and Family." Shortly after his death I sent to the printing office for proofs and found he had written only the dedication and an introductory chapter. The dedication which was to Mrs. Tone, then still living, I sent to one very dear to him in life and death. The opening of the book is worth pre- serving for the insight it furnishes to his method and design. It does not correspond with the title of the first chapter, and was evidently a sort of proem to the book : On the 7th of August, 1796, in a lodging in Paris, sat a: man of middle size, and slender and vivacious frame. His features were long and deli- cate, and his sallow skin was lightly pock-marked. Thought had strained liis cheek and worn his temples ; though he had only reached his thirty- third year on the 20th of the preceding June. A sweet, muscular mouth THE WORKSHOP OF YOUNG IRELAND. 681 and chin betokened that, for all the philosophy and starlight in his eye, he was a loving and a worldly man ; while the transparent and flexible forehead, combined with a thorough-bred carriage of the head, showed daring, pride, and, above all things, concentration. That, you would at once say, is a man in earnest, whatever he's at. He was dressed in riding-boots, tight breeches and body-coat the usual civilian costume, made and worn with a slight dash of foppery. On his table was his commission as Chef de Brigade (Colonel of infantry), in the service of the French Republic ; there, too, were notes signed " Lazare Hoche," " Carnot," " Henri Clarke," and one signed " Archd. Hamilton Rowan," telling how well, though beyond the Atlantic, were the wife and children of that pale man ; and his eye softened, and then he burst into a laugh, with a scrap of a song sounding through it, as he looked on the letter. Spreading a thick rouleau of blank paper before him he wrote on the top of the first page, " Nil Desperaudum" It was Wolfe Tone. Yes ; there sat the Secretary of the Catholic Committee so valued by them that they upheld him even when the fiery prayer of Grattan joined the threats of Government to make them abandon him. There sat the Founder of the United Irishmen. He was in daily negotiation with Carnot "the man of iron," "the organiser of victory; " and with Hoche" the immortal Hoche, grand Pacificator of La Vendee." He had the confidence of the Decemvirs who were beating Europe ; he was under orders to pro- ceed in a few days with that same Hoche, 16,000 veterans, and the last fleet of France, to emancipate, and to rule Ireland. What did he the " infernal rebel " sit down for ? Let him answer : "Paris, August 7, 1796. " As I shall embark, in a business, within a few days, the eveni of which is uncertain, I take the opportunity of a vacant hour to throw on paper a -few memorandums relative to myself and my family, which may amuse my boys, for whom I write them, in case they should hereafter fall into their hands." There, oh reader ! whatsoever be your creed or politics, there is a sight good for you to look at; that young, ambitious, busy, potent man, preparing to embark for his native laud, where a halter or a President's throne * await him, and writing " memorandums " for his boys. These " memo- randums " turn out to be a journal Avritten not in " vacant hours," but amid the turmoil and pressure of business and danger to the last hour, when but we must not anticipate his parting words to his " dearest love" and his " dearest children," for whom he wrote, for whom he laughed when his heart was heavy, and who, with his country, shared that heart whilst it had a beat in it. * This last is no exaggeration Emmet, Russell, Neilson, M'Cracken in fact, the ruling Protestant patriots, adored him, and trusted all to him ; and as he was leaving, the Catholic leaders, Keogh and M'Cormick, gave their "most cordial approbation " to his design of seeking French aid, " observing, at the same time, that if he suc- ceeded, there was nothing in the power of his country to bestow, to which he might not fairly pretend." The Catholics to a man would have backed him, and even the Anglican Tories, who personally loved him, would not have regarded his supremacy as a burden. Perhaps for a moment, Lord Edward, because of his rank, might have been first magistrate of Ireland ; but the tools would soon have got into the " work- man's hands. ' 682 YOUNG IRELAND. If, not Laving money to buy, or time to read that journal, you yet wish to know through what ways that man arrived to the lodging where he thus wrote, arid whence and to what end he left it, then, reader, sit by me for a while, and I will try and tell you simply and trvdy of his life and death. If you still pause to read of one who organised the Irish to revolt, hear what Charles Kendal Bushe said of him : " He (Tone) now wastes on the desert air of an American plantation the brightest talents that I ever knew a man to be gifted with. I am sorry for his fate ; for I never shall speak or think of the unhappy gentle- man, to whom I allude, with acrimony or severity. I knew him from early infancy as the friend of my youth and the companion of my studies, and while I bear testimony to the greatness of his abilities, I shall also say of him that he had a heart which nothing but the accursed spirit of perverted politics could mislead or deprave, and I shall ever lament his fate, with compassion for his errors, admiration for his talents, and abhorrence for his political opinions." * Judge, too, reader, whether he, at whom we have given you such a glimpse, was, indeed, " depraved," or, if you deem his politics " perverted ; " read this, his own accoiint of them to his own family : " It immediately set me thinking more seriously than I had yet done upon the state *>f Ireland. I soon found my theory, and on that theory I have unvaryingly acted ever since. " To subvert the tyranny of an execrable Government, to break the connection with England, the never-failing source of all our political evils, and to assert the independence of my country these were my objects. " To unite the whole people of Ireland, to abolish the memory of all past dissensions, and to substitute the common name of Irishman in place of the denominations of Protestant, Catholic, and Dissenter these were my means." The inquiries Davis set on foot led him on the track of a tradition respect- ing the betrayal of Tone, who was serving as a commissioned officer in the French expedition under Humbert, when he was identified as an Irishman by a loyal squire from the North. I subjoin a letter from John Mitchel on the subject. The Yeomanry Captain mentioned was a namesake and relative of Thackeray's (the same referred to in one of his Snob Papers as " dear old Elias ").f He had long ceased to be a yeoman, however. Having married into the Jocelyn family they presented him with an Irish living, he entered the church and was at this time a venerable clergyman residing at Dunclalk, tall and impressive as Thackeray himself. Davis had applied to him for information by letter, but the residt apparently was not satisfactory : " Banbridge, 7 September, 1845. " MY DEAE DAVIS, I wish you had called on old Mr. Thackeray and examined him by what they call in chancery 'personal interrogatories.' He would have remembered far better, and been a thousand times more communicative. To me who was a perfect stranger to him, but a good listener, he talked most freely and answered each question by a number of anecdotes. Perhaps you will get a letter of introduction and go to him yet. * Speech of Mr. Bushe, in the Irish Commons, on Ponsonby's motion for the Kepeal of the Insurrection Act, 24th March, 1797. t " O noble and dear old Elias, how should he who knows you not respect you and your calling ? " Snob Papers. THE WORKSHOP OF YOUNG IRELAND. 683 " I will set down what I distinctly remember. Mr. Thackeray was an officer in the Cambridgeshire militia, and was quartered in Derry when Tone was taken in Lough Swilly. He was present at Lord Cavan's quarters at Letterkeuny when the French officers were assembled for breakfast at Lord Cavan's, along with the English officers. " Sir George Hill's brother (not himself as Tone's life has it) was the person to recognise and discover him. Lord Cavan immediately informed him that he was regarded not as a prisoner of war but as a traitor and rebel, and was net to sit in company with the other officers. I forget whether Mr. Thackeray confirms the story of his beiiig ironed : but he certainly said that Tone took the matter very quietly, that he was pro- vided his breakfast at a small table apart from the rest, and that ' by the same token ' he made a very hearty breakfast. " Mr. Thackeray was the person who commanded the party which con- ducted Tone from Derry to Dublin. He was taken through the city of Derry (but not I think any further) with his legs ironed under his horse's belly, and was dressed in his uniform as Chef de Brigade. The journey from Derry to Dublin occupied four days. Mr. Thackeray rode by his side all the way, and says he never spent pleasauter days or met a more delightful companion, which it is not hard to believe. " On the morning of the last day they breakfasted in the Old Man of War TTITI thirteen miles from Dublin. Tone had hitherto worn plain clothes (since leaving Derry) but on this morning after breakfast, he went upstairs, and came down in the full dress French uniform. Mr. Thackeray says he knew that this was done in order that he might be known and rescued by the people before reaching Dublin, a very improbable thing : and that therefore he was determined not to go with him in that dress. They had however been up to that time on so friendly and familiar terms that he had much reluctance in addressing him in any other tone. But at length he observed that the morning was cold, and that Mr. Tone had better not travel without any outside coat or cloak. Tone replied that he felt not at all cold and would ride on as he was. Then Mr. Thackeray told him he could not permit that, and if he persisted force must be used. " The old gentleman here became more reserved in his communication, and merely said that the remainder of the journey was painful. I did not press for further particulars, but concluded that poor Tone was fettered here again. " The only point in which all this differs from the other accounts is the making Tone's detector to be Sir George Hill's brother. I intended writing to yon soon on this subject, but did not know that you were already engaged upon poor Theobald. It is a sad story, but hardly sadder than the one which has fallen to my lot to tell (Life of Hugh O'Neill). ' "What curse is on our land and us ? ' I am going to put the motto you sent me upon the title page, though I think it looks somewhat pedantic for a man who knows not a word of Irish. Of all shabby pretensions, that of pre- tending to know what one does not know is about the shabbiest. Faithfully yours, "JOHN MITCHEL. " We had a very delightful but too short excursion through the North : but poor Duffy had to leave us at Donegal, as I suppose you know." Davis's friends after his death were very anxious that the memoir of Tone should be finished. John Dillon took the printed chapter with him to Madeira, intending to complete the volume during his residence there ; but this purpose was unfortunately not carried out. CHAPTER VII. THE PROVINCIAL COLLEGES. WHEN the Maynooth Bill had passed through the dan- gerous stages, the Government submitted their scheme of middle class education. The measure was explained by Sir James Graham in a speech of notable frankness. In Ireland he said the creed of the great majority of the people had long been treated by the State as a hostile religion ; in latter times this evil was being gradually abated, civil liberty had been conferred on the Catholics, the penal laws were removed, or in process of removal, but such traces of this spirit as remained were nowhere more noxious than when they tainted public education. The Government desired to establish Colleges for the middle classes on the principle of perfect religious equality. It was proposed to erect one college for the South, probably at Cork, one for the West at Galway or Limerick, and one for the North at Derry or Belfast. There would be no provision made for the residence of the students within the colleges, but they would be sub- ject to academical control. There would be no inter- ference positive or negative with their religious convic- tions ; but religion would not be neglected, it was THE PROVINCIAL COLLEGES. 685 intended to give facilities for the endowment bv private benefaction of professors of theology, to train the students in the religion of their forefathers, for which purpose the use of the lecture rooms would be afforded. A new University would probably be created to grant degrees to the students of these institutions. The professors would in the first instance be appointed by the Crown, afterwards this method would bo abandoned. The measure was well received in the House of Commons. Mr. Eoche and Mr. Morgan John O'Connell, members of the Eepeal Association, and Mr. Wyse, Mr. Ross, and Sir Henry Winston Barren, nationalists of thb Federal section, welcomed it as a substantial and Jiberal concession. But it did not escape criticism. Mr. Sheil regretted that it was not made imperative on students to attend some religious instruction ; and that the Government had not placed themselves in communi- cation witli the Catholic Bishops, as they had recently done with respect to the Maynooth Bill. Sir Robert Inglis, on behalf of good old stolid respectable Toryism, insisted that there ought to be religious teaching in all State Schools, but that it ought to be the teaching of the Church of England, and pronounced the plan to be a huge scheme of Godless education. The reception of the proposal in Ireland was for a time doubtful. A moiety of the Catholic Bishops led by the Primate, O'Brien, Davis, the national Protestants universally, and the bulk of the writers and thinkers connected with the Eepeal movement, greatly desired 686 YOUNG IRELAND. middle class education for the Catholics, and were ready to welcome it on any fair terms ; for of all the mono- polies which the minority enjoyed, the most fatal, to the hopes of national progress, was the monopoly of education. The proposal was immediately taken into considera- tion by the General Committee. A majority regarded it as a measure as generous in design as the Maynooth Bill, and which a little care would render as unexception- able . But the minority included O'Connell and Mr. John O'Connell, who amazed the Committee by de- nouncing the scheme as altogether and designedly evil. After a prolonged conversation which disclosed a rooted difference of opinion, Davis advised that under the circumstances the controversy should be kept out of the Association, and conducted as the opposition to the Bequests Bill had been conducted a year before, in the press and by public meetings convened for the special purpose. But O'Connell announced, in peremptory terms, his intention of opening up the question at once in Conciliation Hall. He carried out his purpose at the next meeting ; and his speech was devoted to a trenchant criticism of the scheme. He adopted the phraseology of Sir Robert Inglis and pronounced it " Godless." But the Government might render it acceptable by making the colleges at Cork and Galway strictly Catholic, while the college at Derry might be Presbyterian as Trinity College was Protestant. He professed himself ready however to abandon his opposition if the Catholic Bishops approved of the scheme.* * Repeal Association, May 12th, 1845. THE PROVINCIAL COLLEGES. 687 Education is a subject of supreme importance, and O'Connell's opinion upon the Government proposal was naturally entitled to grave consideration ; but nothing can be plainer, than that he was not justified in carrying this vexed question into the Repeal Association. The object of that body was to Repeal the Union, and its constitution had been modified for the express purpose of combining men who desired a native Parliament, without sacrificing their individual opinions on any other question. It was idle to talk of converting the North and uniting with the Federalists, if it was necessary to accept in silence the opinion of O'Connell upon subjects of this nature, or to contest them with him in the Association of which he was the leader. By crossing the street he might have held meetings on the subject without breaking the fundamental pact, and without materially diminishing the force of his oppo- sition. A year before he had agreed to exclude from the Association the consideration of the Bequests Bill, for reasons which applied with increased force to the present Bill.* If he still hoped and desired to Eepeal the Union, it was plainly necessary to exhibit in Conciliation Hall that consideration for the rights of the minority which would alone induce them to trust him with power in an Irish Parliament. His disregard of these motives brought to a sharp test the fidelity and affection of his * "He consented, out of deference to the minority, to keep the Bequests question out of the Association ; why not this question also j* " Davis Papers. Davis to O'Brien, Dec. 10, 1844. 688 YOUNG IRELAND. associates ; but so loyal was their recognition of liis authority that his speech was allowed to pass without comment. Later in the meeting however Mr. John O'Connell spoke on the same subject, and spoke in a tone unusually fierce, offensive and dictatorial. He felt he said a degree of indignation to which it was impossible not to give utterance, at the melancholy spectacle which some of the Irish members had made of themselves, by presuming to commit their countrymen to the abominable scheme of education proposed by Sir James Graham. Who or what were they, that they should presume to com- promise the Irish people ? It was the duty of the laity to leave the question in the hands of the Bishops, and for this reason he would not expatiate at any length on the subject ; but would endeavour to suppress for the present, his feelings of abomination and execration at this infamous attempt of the English ministers to seduce and divide, where they could not hope to conquer. This was somewhat too much. The most respectable of the Irish members were assailed for expressing their opinion in Parliament upon a measure submitted in the ordinary manner for acceptance or rejection ; and the young man of mediocre talents and discretion who denounced them, thought himself entitled to pronounce a far more decisive judgment upon the measure in a place where men were not assembled to pass Acts of Parliament, but to procure the Eepeal of the Union ; and to pronounce it with the full knowledge that he was speaking the sentiments of the minority only of the THE PROVINCIAL COLLEGES. 689 governing body. Dillon and Davis, who were present, felt they had no choice but to interpose. The world might make allowance for O'Connell's opinion being received in silence, but how would it interpret a similar indulgence being extended to the violence and arrogance of a personage of the calibre of Mr. John O'Connell? All hope of winning the support of independent men was at an end if a stand were not made against this attempt to bully individual opinion. Davis spoke immediately. It was with feelings of regret, and a good deal of anxiety, he felt it necessary to express his respectful but positive dissent from some of the opinions of his friend Mr. John O'Connell. He was not yet in a position, nor he feared were any of them, to judge of the details 'of a measure, which was loosely stated by its proposer and was not printed. He believed the people of this country were anxious to get academic education, no matter from whom it came ; for it was a gift which could not be polluted by the hands through which it passed. A liberal endowment was proposed for which he was grateful, but it was accompanied by principles of Government interference against which he protested ; for he was not disposed to surrender the selection of the instructors of the youth of Ireland into the hands of an anti-Irish Government. In any coun- try the principle of combined education of its youth he thought a good principle ; but in Ireland, whose peculiar curse was religious dissension, that principle was invaluable. He was just as ready and willing as Mr. John O'Connell to demand guarantees, that the religion s s 690 YOUNG IRELAND. of the students should be protected from the propa- gandism or treachery of any of the professors. Were the religious discipline and instruction of the Catholic students entrusted to a Catholic dean, appointed by the Catholic Church authorities, and the religious conduct and training of Protestants and Presbyterians left to deans named by the Protestant and Presbyterian authorities, no church could complain with any show of justice, and he believed it was quite consistent with the general system of endowment proposed that such an arrangement might be adopted. On these grounds he dissented from the opinions expressed by Mr. John O'Connell without however desiring to give unqualified approval to the measure. O'Connell rose a second time to declare that the discussion was premature and ought to terminate. He could not blame his friend Mr. Davis for having entered into it, for it had been commenced by the member for Kilkenny and himself, but it would be more judicious to reserve further discussion till the bill was printed. Mr. Davis condemned the absence of religious instruction, but the very principle of the bill was to have no religious instruction in the projected colleges or under their influence. Mr. Dillon interposed to remind O'Connell that this was a mistake. The Government measure by no means discouraged religious instruction; on the contrary it contained an express provision empowering the establishment of a hall to each of the provincial colleges for the purpose of affording facilities to have the students instructed in the doctrines of their church. Mr. O'Connell : What a great advantage a hall is to teach religion in ! Really my friend is laughing at me. The Govern- ' ment education bill gives us a hall forsooth. Why we could give them Conciliation Hall. THE PROVINCIAL COLLEGES. 691 Mr. Dillon : I merely wished to set Mr. O'Connell right when he stated that the bill discountenanced religious instruction. That is not the fact. Religious instruction is encouraged by the bill. Mr. O'Connell : Religious instruction is not encouraged by the bill which Sir James Graham brought forward; it is dis- couraged by it. Religious instruction is to be carefully excluded from the new colleges. Such are the terms of the bill. It is not difficult to understand the motives that lay at the root of this controversy. The young men were Catholics and Protestants, united like brothers in a generous design, many of them had been educated to- gether and had learned to love each other when hearts are fresh and open, and they hoped to see the same fraternity extended throughout the nation, by the same means. They knew that Catholic students in the only university in the island were lured to apostacy and hypocrisy by the exclusive system on which it was founded, and they were impatient to see colleges estab- lished on the principle of religious equality where these temptations would disappear. They had no confidence in the judgment of Mr. John O'Connell, and a very lively suspicion that he was more anxious to place the Young Trelanders in antagonism to some of the Catholic Bishops, than to promote or thwart any particular system of education. It was not necessary to doubt that, c&teris paribus, he preferred separate education; but they were persuaded that he carried the question into the Association and provoked the debate which he knew must ensue, in pursuance of a design to represent them as indifferent to religion. O'Connell as the Catholic s s 2 692 YOUNG IRELAND. leader had his vigilance naturally awakened by the nature of the question, and it is probable his pride was hurt by the intrusion of any other opinion into a domain where his own used to be supreme. It is easy to mis- conceive critics, and he Avas surrounded by persons cer : tain to put the worst construction upon any opposition to his will. He was the prey of an insidious disease, and, added to all these motives, he was perplexed by the difficulty which has embarrassed so many kings and tribunes, of securing the succession to his authority for a feeble pretender ; and he was ready to make inordinate sacrifices for this end. To obtain education for the Catholic middle class and save the Association from disruption, was a task that tested the energies of the men who had both objects at heart. The Nation took a decided stand with this latter party. In the number following the debate, Davis and the editor wrote upon the question, and it is curious to note how the Protestant and Catholic nationalist treating the same subject, rely each upon arguments and Yeelings drawn from the experience of his own class. Davis unburthened the heart of a man sick of the feuds and prejudices which had divided the nation into two hostile camps. The Irish had been made and kept serfs he said because they were ignorant and divided. The Protestant hated the Catholic and op- pressed him, the Catholic hated the Protestant and re- fused to trust him. Any plan which would strengthen the soul of Ireland with knowledge, and knit the creeds in liberal and trusting friendship, would be better for THE PROVINCIAL COLLEGES. 693 her than if corn and wine were scattered from every cloud. If such a project could not be discussed in a reasonable and discreet way, the progress of the people to^self government was a progress to shameful ruin. The objections to separate education were immense, the reasons for it were reasons for separate life, for mutual animosities, for penal laws, for religious wars. United education was the principle accepted by Ireland in the National Schools, the principle favourable to that union of Irishmen for want of which Ireland was in rags and chains. An adequate provision for religious discipline was not to be dispensed with, and the appointment of the professors by the Government would be a fatal agent of seduction. Within five years after Lord Clare's Act gave the Government the appointment of Assistant Barristers the county bench was filled with bigots, blockheads and partisans and the bar, once the body guard of independence, became the pretorians of the Castle. The literary class must not again be cor- rupted by the same methods. But these blemishes on the scheme might be removed. On my part, I appealed directly to the Catholic middle class from which I sprung. I bade them remember that early and systematic training was among the most precious of the advantages which we had lost with tlie loss of a national existence. It was the basis of all practical success in life ; and in this training whether scholastic, social, or professional, we were behind nearly every civilized nation. After centuries in which the education of Catholics had been prohibited as a crime, 694 YOUNG IRELAND. or contemptuously tolerated but never fostered, the English minister offered us a system of large scope fettered by injurious restrictions and conditions. What was it fit we should do with it ? What we were clearly not to do with it, was to reject it with hatred and clamour. Of all races the Celts most needed and most profited by discipline ; and the penalty we were paying for the want of it was of a very practical kind. While trained and educated Scotchmen were scattered over the world administering its offices of trust and emolument " from Indus to the Pole," our poor exiles were sweating under its heaviest burthens, and stooping to its meanest offices. Our plain duty was to strive that the objectionable provisions of the bill should be amended. As respects the objection of non -residence, non-residence was the practice in most of the Catholic colleges on the Continent, and the dangers it threatened could be guarded against by a system of licensed lodging houses under the superintendence of deans appointed by the ordinary. Another objection was well founded, there must be two Professors of History. The Middle Ages, " the Reformation," the Revolution were fields of enquiry where concurrence was impossible. But our duty was to amend, not to reject, the scheme. The members of the Association who held these views were not confined to the Young Ireland section. Several conspicuous men who adhered to O'Connell in the subsequent disruption of the body, and several who re- tired from public life rather than take sides in that un- happy contest, were eager that the bill might be rendered THE PROVINCIAL COLLEGES. 695 acceptable. A statement of their views was prepared, embodying a positive pledge to oppose any settlement which did not provide amply for religious education, and was privately presented to O'Connell in the hope of stopping further debate in public. For a moment it seemed probable that this end would be attained. At the meeting of the Association following the one just described O'Connell stated that it was not his intention to express any opinion on the Education Bill upon that occasion ; a meeting of the Catholic Bishops would be held during the week and he would accept and adhere to whatever decision they might arrive at respecting the religious portion of the measure. But he desired to refer to the Parliamentary Committee for immediate consideration and report, the clause which gave the Grovernment the appointment of professors and the clause which regulated the use of class-rooms for religious teaching. O'Brien was absent from these debates, perhaps intentionally, for he shrank with wise forbearance from any contest with O'Connell. But a man cannot long escape the responsibilities of his position. Davis kept him acquainted with the proceedings in committee and urged him to resume his place. " I implore of you " he said "to come to town before Saturday. If this difficulty be got over, we have little to fear in future."* * Cahermoyle Correspondence. Although O'Brien was in intimate relations with several of the Young Irelanders, he belonged at this time as little to their section as to the other. He aimed to maintain a complete neutrality, doubtless with a view to intervene from time to time more effectually in the common interest. But friendly critics were of opinion that he was sometimes more careful of his personal dignity than became a 696 YOUNG IRELAND. The return of O'Brien, and in a much larger degree the decision of the Bishops, were awaited as decisive factors in the contest. The conference of the Catholic Bishops had a result creditable to their ^ense and moderation. They resolved to accept the hill provided certain amendments were made to protect the faith and morals of Catholic students ; hut failing these amendments to reject it. The amendments were neither exacting nor inordinate. They claimed that a fair propor- tion of the Professors should be Catholics whose moral conduct was vouched for by their respective prelates. That a board of Trustees, of whom the Bishops of the Province where the college was established should be members, would be entitled to remove any officer convicted of an attempt to tamper with faith or morals. And that a Catholic chaplain should be appointed to each college to superintend the religious instruction of the Catholic students.* If these concessions were not made the measure would be dangerous and inadmissible. The supporters of the measure saw with delight leader, who must be content to run risks. At this time he sent a letter to the committee respecting the Colleges ; Davis moved that it shonld be read at the next public meeting, but O'Connell took violent exception to this course. To avert a catastrophe Davis and O'Loghlen assumed the respon- sibility of postponing the letter to another day, and this exercise of dis- cretion offended O'Brien more I think than was just or reasonable. Davis excused himself with good temper. " I should not have consented to the holding over of your letter, but that had it been read yesterday it would have led to a violent debate which would almost necessarily have broken up the Association. There was no second opinion as to the danger. Under such a peril I and others who concurred in your views, acted as we did, though certainly I felt that our doing so might cau.se you much annoyance, ai;d would be a very great liberty one that I at least shall never take again." Cahermoyle Correspondence. * Memorial and resolutions of the Bishops printed at the end of tl:e chapter. THE PROVINCIAL COLLEGES. 97 that the Bishops accepted the principle of mixed educa- tion, provided there were adequate provisions against proselytism ; and for such provisions they were all ready to contend. Public meetings of Catholic and Protestant gentlemen and clergymen in Cork, Limerick and Gal way also approved of the bill, subject to certain amendments. The Catholics had not the least desire to see education divorced from religious sentiment and religious obligations, they would have been well content in a Catholic country to have made the Catholic Church the chief teacher, but they were alarmed at the risk of their children running the race of life weighted with the burthens which they had themselves endured. The ques- tion seemed in a fair way of being settled. But O'Connell and Mr. John C'Connell though they had promised to accept the decision of the Bishops had gone too far to follow moderate counsels ; they seemed to regard their personal authority and influence as depending on the defeat of the measure. At the subsequent meeting of the Association, Smith O'Brien made a speech designed to promote peace. Ireland, he said, was a religious nation and he honoured the solicitude which had been exhibited by Catholics to secure religious education. He saw no difficulty however in engrafting on the Government plan some adequate provision for this purpose. He con- curred generally in the fairness of the claims made by the Bishops, and differed from his friend Mr. John O'Connell in his opinion that Catholics and Protes- tants should have separate colleges. It was extremely 698 YOUNG IRELAND. desirable that there should be united education in order that young men should cherish those friendly associa- tions in youth which subdue the animosities of manhood.* O'Connell who followed spoke for two hours. He came there he said to denounce the bill from one end to the other. If he were silent heretofore or spoke only his individual opinion, now, as a Catholic and for the Catholics of Ireland, he unhesitatingly and entirely condemned this execrable bill. A more nefarious attempt at profligacy and corruption never disgraced any minister. The Evening Post had recently pub- lished an anonymous letter in defence of it, which he knew to be the production of a Catholic clergyman ; and in this publi- cation the writer said he had before him the private letter of a Cabinet Minister on the subject written in August, '44. In August, '44, the state prisoners were suffering unjust captivity and at that time a Cabinet Minister was writing to a Catholic clergyman in Dublin to win the Catholic clergy to support an administration which had employed a packed jury and prejudiced judges to obtain their conviction ! But the resolution of the Bishops defeated their chance of success. The Bishops had declared the system as proposed would be dangerous to the faith and morals of Catholic pupils. Was he to be blamed, then, or was the member for Kilkenny to be blamed, for their early resistance to it? Would one independent man be appointed to a professorship under the measure? Political and religious renegadism would be the highest qualification for office. But such a measure would not be accepted. He offered Sir Robert Peel his congratulations upon his success in this experiment ! He rejoiced to believe that all symptoms of division and dissen- sion in the Association were at an end ; all were agreed in condemning the ministerial measure in its present shape; they * Repeal Association, May 26th. THE PROVINCIAL COLLEGES. 699 were all ready to accept a bill based upon just and tolerant principles and founded on fair and reasonable terms. The debate was continued by Mr. John O'Connell who denied that the memorial of the Bishops favoured mixed education ; and by Mr. M. J. Barry who said he was utterly indifferent by what name it was called, but he was in favour of such a system as the memorial of the Bishops contemplated, in which ample provision would be made for religious education, and ample guarantee for faith and morals, but where Protestants and Catholics would grow up together in mutual friend- liness and confidence. Up to this point, a question full of difficulty had been debated with mutual courtesy and forbearance. But the controversy was not destined so to end. There was hanging about the Association and the press at that time a young man named Conway, a person of go'od ability and loose principles, ready of speech and of singular self-possession, but whose want of conduct had robbed him of all personal weight. He had spoken occasionally in Conciliation Hall, and written occasionally in the national journals, and had obtained all the success which is awarded to cleverness without character. It is too little to say that he had won con- fidence from nobody ; he belonged to a class to whom confidence is never given. On political questions his brain, when not disordered by excesses, made him worth listening to, but on questions of morals or ethics his pretending to have any convictions would have been regarded by those who knew him as an offensive 700 YOUNG IRELAND. jest. He was by birth and education a Catholic, but the loose hold his professed creed had upon him was illustrated a few years later by his accepting the bounty of a Proselytising Association to profess him- self a convert to Protestantism. This person stepped forward to do work which a man of character would have shrunk from ; which Mr. John O'Connell was afraid to undertake, except in secret whispers and pri- vate correspondence to suggest that Davis Dillon and their associates were favourable to the measure because they were indifferent to religion. Whether he was an agent or a volunteer was somewhat doubtful at the time ; but it is possible he was a volunteer, for he was labouring under a recent personal grievance. Four or five weeks earlier he had presented himself as a candidate at the Eighty-two Club and had been rejected. He assumed, rightly enough I dare say, that the Young Irelanders had voted against him ; and he privately appealed to O'Brien to do him justice, reminding him that he was " a Clare man with a cross of Tipperary " ; * but as he got no redress he was ripe for mischief. He broke into the debate by announcing that he was entrusted with a contribution to the Repeal funds from Armagh. More than a thousand years had passed over since the apostle of Irish Christianity had planted the standard of the cross on the heights of Pagan Armagh. He believed St. Patrick was a Roman Catholic, some claimed him as a Protestant, he had once heard him described as a Presbyterian, but at any rate he was no friend of masked infidelity, of mixed education. His * Letter to Smith O'Brien dated 28th April 1845. Cahermoyle Cor- respondence. THE PROVINCIAL COLLEGES. 701 learned friend who preceded him was for the bill, and against the bill ; there was an imbecility in his speech characteristic of his party and his principles ; a party which the strong hand of O'Conuell must, not exterminate, but warn. On an essential point Mr. Barry declared himself " utterly indifferent." Utterly indifferent ! What a sentiment for a Catholic. Ireland was not indifferent to the memorials which his own relative left behind him in the Church of God. Such a reputation as he had won was worth far more than the temporary applause of a coterie, or the cheers of a baffled faction. The sentiment triumphant in the meeting that day was a sentiment common to all Ireland. The Calvinist or Episcopalian of the North, the Unitarian, the Sectaries, every man who had any faith in Christianity, was resolved that it should neither be robbed or thieved by a faction half acquainted with the principles they put forward, and not at all comprehending the Irish character or the Irish heart. Were his audience prepared to yield up old discord or sympathies to the theories of Young Ireland ? As a Catholic and as an Irish- man while he was ready to meet his Protestant 'friends upon an equal platform, he would resent any attempt at ascendancy whether it came from honest Protestants or honest professing Catholics. This tipsy rhodomontade would have been forgotten as soon as it was uttered, if O'Connell had not raised it into importance by taking Mr. Conway under his patronage. Mr. Doheny describes him as waving his cap repeatedly over his head during its delivery and cheering vociferously.* With something of the habitual ingratitude of sovereigns and dictators, he forgot the most substantial services in a moment of wrath ; and the nisi prius advocate of forty years' experience, was neither wanting in devices to embarrass his opponents, * Doheny's " Felon's Track." " Mr. O'Connell took off his cap, waved it repeatedly over his head, and cheered vociferously," p. 43. 702 YOUNG IRELAND. nor too scrupulous in using them. Davis who followed Mr. Conway glanced good-humouredly at the grotesque contrast between the man and the speech by calling him his " very Catholic friend." O'Connell interrupted him to ask if it was a crime to be a Catholic ; and suggested that Davis was sneering at Catholics ! Fence of this sort had perhaps been successful in former conflicts, and asrainst a different class of antagonists, but directed O C3 * against a man like Thomas Davis, in the presence of those to whom his life and labours were familiar, who loved him more than their own kith and kin, it proved a perilous mistake. As the contest was a turning point in the national movement, it is fit that it should be set out in detail. I have not Davis said on rising more than a few words to say, in reply to the useful judicious and spirited speech of my old college friend, my Catholic friend, my very Catholic friend Mr. Conway. Mr. O'Connell : It is no crime to be a Catholic I hope ? Mr. Davis : No, surely no, for Mr. O'Conne-11 : The sneer with which you used the word would lead to the inference. Mr. Davis : No ! sir, no ! My best friends, my nearest friends, my truest friends are Catholics. I was brought up in a mixed seminary, where I learned to know and knowing to love my Catholic countrymen, a love that shall not be disturbed by these casual and unhappy dissensions. Disunion, alas, has destroyed our country for centuries. Men of Ireland, shall it destroy it again ? Will you take the boys of Ireland in their earliest youth and deepen the difference between them. Will you sedulously seclude them from knowing the virtues, the genius, the spirit, the affections of each other ? If you do, you THE PROVINCIAL COLLEGES. 703 will vainly hope that they who were carefully separated in youth will be united in manhood, and stand together for their country. Sir, I rise to express my strong- approval of the memorial of the Catholic Bishops. That memorial contains four propositions and to every one of them I yield my cordial con- currence. The first of these propositions demands that a " fair proportion " of the professors and office-bearers in the new colleges shall be members of the Roman Catholic Church. That is a just, and reasonable demand. Mark the words, a " fail- proportion," not the entire but " a proportion ; " meaning beyond doubt meaning beyond reasonable dispute that the remainder should be Protestants. That, sir, is mixed instruction. The same clause demands, too, that the Bishops of each province shall be members of the governing board. Note the words " of which " not exclusively composing the board, but ' ' of which " the Roman Catholic Bishops shall be members. That, sir, is mixed management. The second clause is marked by the same care of Catholic rights, and the same adoption, by necessary inference, of mixed education. It demands that in some speci- fied branches the Roman Catholic students shall be taught by Roman Catholic Professors the unmistakable meaning of this demand is for separate chairs in a mixed college. Separate chairs for the teaching of those subjects which cannot be taught by the professors of one creed without probable offence or in- justice to the creed of others. I say that is a just demand. I fully concur also in the purpose of the third proposition in this memorial, which suggests that (t if any president, vice-president, professor, or office-bearer shall be convicted before the Board of Trustees of attempting to undermine the faith, or injure the morals of any student he shall be immediately removed from his office by the same board ;" that is, by the board of which the Roman Catholic Prelates are to form a part. And now, sir, I come to the last proposition. " That as it is not contemplated that the students shall be provided with lodgings in the new colleges, there shall be Roman Catholic chaplains to superintend the moral and religious instruction of the Roman Catholic 704 YOUNG IRELAND. students/' I say that such a provision is most just and most necessary. I say now, what I said before on this day fortnight ; I denounce this bill for not containing such a provision. Mr. O'Connell : You praised the bill. Mr. Davis : I praised the bill on certain grounds, and on these grounds I praise it now, and will praise it again. The proposal runs that the appointment of each chaplain, with a suitable salary, shall be made on the recommendation of the Roman Catholic Bishop of the diocese in which the college is situate, and that the same prelate shall have full power and authority to remove such Roman Catholic chaplain from his situation. " Signed, Daniel Murray, chairman." There could be no fitter name to authenticate that document. Dr. Murray carries into the academical colleges the same principles that regulate the National Board of which he is one of the most learned esteemed and honoured governors. Mr. Davis concluded his brief persuasive statement in these terms : I offer the ti'ibute of my sincere respect to that memorial, to the principles on which it is founded, and to the reasonings, for I have heard precisely what they were, which induced the Bishops to adopt it. I denounce the bill as containing no provision for the religious discipline of the boys taken away from the paternal shelter. Beyond all I denounce the bill for giving the Govern- ment a right to appoint and dismiss professors, a right to corrupt and intimidate. For these reasons, I and those who think with me are prepared to give this bill in its present shape an unflinch- ing opposition, and I sit down repeating my cordial adherence to this memorial. Notwithstanding the opposition of O'Connell, Davis's speech was received with great favour by the Associa- tion. The character of the man, the lucidity of his statement, and the singleness of purpose with which he THE PROVINCIAL COLLEGES. 705 was moved, made a manifest impression. O'Connell, who had already spoken for two hours, thought it necessary to reply to him. And he clutched at the weapon heretofore abandoned to hands like those of Mr. Conway. One point, he exclaimed, Mr. Davis omitted altogether. He did not read the resolution unanimously adopted at the meeting of the prelates, wherein they declared that they felt themselves, anxious as they were to extend the advantages of education, bound to withhold their approbation from the proposed system as they deemed it dangerous to the faith and morals of the Catholic people. The system was met with the unequivocal and unani- mous condemnation of the venerated and esteemed body. The principle of the bill has been lauded by Mr. Davis, and was advocated in a newspaper professing to be the organ of the Roman Catholic people of this country, but which I emphatically pronounce to be no such thing. The section of politicians styling themselves the Young Ireland party, anxious to rule the destinies of this country, start up and support this measure. There is no such party as that styled " Young Ireland/' There may be a few individuals who take that denomination on themselves. I am for Old Ireland. 'Tis time that this delusion should be put an end to. Young Ireland may play what pranks they please. I do not envy them the name they rejoice in, I shall stand by Old Ireland. And I have some slight notion that Old Ireland will stand by me. When O'Connell sat down consternation was uni- versal ; he had commenced a war in which either by success or failure he would bring ruin to the national cause. Smith O'Brien and Henry Grattan who were sitting near him probably remonstrated, for in a few minutes he rose again to withdraw the nickname of " Young Ireland " as he understood it was disclaimed T T 706 YOUXG IE EL AND. by those to whom it was applied. Davis immediately rejoined that he was glad to get rid of the assumption that there were factions in the Association. He never knew any other feeling among his friends, except in the momentary heat of passion, but that they were bound to work together for Irish nationality. They were bound among other motives by a strong affection towards Daniel O'Connell; a feeling which he himself had habitually expressed in his private correspondence with his dearest and closest friends. At this point the strong self -restrained man paused from emotion, and broke into irrepressible tears. He was habitually neither emotional nor demonstrative, but he had been in a state of nervous anxiety for hours ; the cause for which he had laboured so long and sacrificed so much was in peril on both hands. The Association might be broken up by a conflict with O'Connell, or it might endure a worse fate if it became despicable, by suppressing convictions of public duty at his dictation. With these fears mixed perhaps the recollection of the generous forbearance from blame, and the promptitude to praise, which marked his own relations to O'Connell, and the painful contrast with these sentiments presented by the scene he had just witnessed. He shed tears from the strong passion of a strong man. The leaders of the Commons of England, the venerable Coke, John Pym, and Sir John Eliot, men of iron will, wept when Charles I. extinguished the hope of an understanding between the people and the Crown. Tears of wounded THE PROVINCIAL COLLEGES. 707 sensibility choked the utterance of Fox when Burke publicly renounced his friendship. Both the public and the private motives united to assail the sensibility of Davis. O'Connell, whose instincts were generous and cordial, and who was only suspicious from training and violent by set purpose, immediately interposed with warm expressions of good will. He had never felt more gratified than by this evidence of regard. If Mr. Davis were overcome, it overcame him also ; he thanked him cordially, and tendered him his hand. The Association applauded their reconciliation with enthusiasm. After this episode Davis resumed : He and his friends in their anxiety to co-operate with O'Connell had often sacrificed their own predilections and never opposed him except when they were convinced in conscience that it was a duty to do so. He trusted their disagreement would leave no sting behind. If there had been any harshness of feeling, if any person had made use of private influence to foster dissension and to misrepresent them to each other, he would forgive it, if the offence were not repeated. He would sit down with a prayer to Almighty God that the people of this country, and the leaders of the people, might continue united in the pursuit of liberty in which they were so often defeated before at the moment of its apparent fruition ; and with a supplication to God that they might not be defeated again. These were almost the last words of counsel Thomas Davis uttered, face to face with the people whom he Iov6d_so truly and served so well. This contest not only produced a painful impression at the moment, but left behind poisonous seeds of dis - T T 2 708 YOUNG IRELAND. trust and division. It probably had still more disas- trous results too subtle to be traced. Before three months elapsed the younger and more hopeful nature was extinguished in death. Before two years, the historic leader was carried to his grave ; having out- lived in the interval the power and popularity upon which he relied so proudly for dominating in this contest. Davis's death has been referred to this trans- action as one of its proximate causes, but this is a mistake. He bore away a wound which bled inwardly, but his nature was too robust to sink under it. He had the strongest incitement to live in the desire to carry his cause to success, and in the plighted love of one who possessed all his affections. The reflex action of that encounter on O'Connell's influence was seriously detrimental at the moment, and perhaps finally destructive. A burning sense of wrong was excited by the foul blow struck at Davis. It made men more suspicious of the justice of O'Connell's criti- cism, and readier to canvass his motives. The more thoughtful knew that, of the two combatants, Ireland could least spare the one of whom she knew next to nothing. The popular organisation was mainly the work of O' Conn ell, but the growth of national opinion among the middle class, the passionate adherence of the new generation to its aims, the respect which it had gained among opponents for breadth and sincerity, the practical projects on which it was employed, and the Protestant recruits it had won, were attributable in a far larger degree to Davis. They were persuaded that THE PROVINCIAL COLLEGES. 709 another O'Connell, distant as might be his coming, would arise before another Davis. One was a leader credited by the world not only with the prodigious work which he actually performed, but with much that was done by others. He was living in the midst of his private friends ; his nearest relatives were his agents and associates. He received an income from the people, far beyond the official salary of the Presi- dent of the American Republic, or of the Prime Minister of any constitutional kingdom in Europe ; and he controlled an expenditure which approximated to the civil list of some European sovereigns. In his youth he had tasted the supreme joy of self-sacrifice for the cause he loved, but he had long been an un- crowned King in authority and inviolability, and had come to regard the interest of his dynasty and the interest of the nation as necessarily identical, and to treat dissent, as treason. The other in becoming a Repealer had separated in action from his family and from many of his familiar friends, and had relinquished the chances of success in his profession. He employed his splendid abilities in the public cause without reward and almost without recognition. He had never accepted so much as a postage stamp from the Repeal funds, or from any other public source, except the legiti- mate payment of his work as a journalist. While O'Connell's reputation was like a great river, fed by many streams which were lost in the current they helped to swell, Davis was only known, outside the circle of his friends, by adversaries who industriously 710 YOUNG IE ELAND. disparaged him. He was content to be nothing in the common view, to see other men credited with his work, and he would have applauded and blessed any human being, friend or enemy, who could have carried the Irish cause to success. One of the greatest resources at O'Connell's com- mand, had he been able and willing to use it, was the band of young men who stood, as one of them sang " like sheathed swords around him," and now it seemed to sober spectators that co-operation between them was at an end. But if this calamity came the young men were resolved it should not come by any fault of theirs. In the next Nation the final reconciliation was dwelt upon more than the original dispute, and the people were admonished not to be alarmed by temporary controver- sies. Exact concurrence on public questions was only to be found among the ignorant and slavish ; but on the other hand it had been the custom of the committee to prevent discussion in public on questions where dif- ferences were serious, and the maintenance of this rule was essential to the existence of the Association. For a time there was a settled truce. At the next meeting O'Connell maintained complete silence on the bill, and his example was followed on all sides. In the course of the week he left town to attend Repeal de- monstrations in the South, and an interval seemed to be secured to heal the recent scars. But Mr. John O'Connell, who remained, apparently interpreted the truce to mean that his opponents were to be silent, but that his tongue was to be unchecked. He proceeded as THE PROVINCIAL COLLEGES. 711 if his aim from the beginning had been to make the continuance of Davis and his friends in the Association impossible ; and writing a generation later, after having conversed on the subject many times with men on both sides of the controversy, I believe that such was indeed his aim. At the next meeting he announced from the general committee a petition against vesting the appoint- ment of professors in the Government, reminded the Association that points upon which there was a dif- ference of opinion ought to be avoided ; and then pro- ceeded to reiterate all his original objections in a speech of two hours' duration, fortifying them by letters from clergymen who denounced the measure as infidel. For the support which Protestant nationalists gave the bill he accounted with charming simplicity. It was no doubt with an ultimate view to proselytism. He was sure they would use no unworthy means to injure the Catholic faith, but, being conscientious Protestants, it was natural to suppose that anything which would draw adherents away from it would meet their sanction and approval. O'Brien warmly denied any such wish or purpose, and Henry Grattan deprecated the introduction of topics which gave the discussion in Conciliation Hall a pole- mical character. A more formidable and dangerous critic was looking on at these transactions. A country clergyman, unknown to his audience, for he was attending the Association for the first time, but of a scholarly and cultivated mien, which arrested the eye, got up and declared that it had been his intention to dissent from 712 YOUNG IRELAND. some of the opinions expressed by Mr. John O'Connell, but that gentleman had privately requested him to desist, and as it was a first request he could not think of refusing it. The priest who was silenced on this occasion, often afterwards spoke with trenchant emphasis on the policy and practice of Conciliation Hall, for this stranger was Father John Kenyon of Templederry. When the Committee re-assembled they insisted on the truce being binding on all, and at the succeeding meeting of the Association O'Neil Daunt, who was in the chair, announced that an understanding had been arrived at, not to discuss the details of the College Bill in the absence of O'Connell. But the decision came too late ; a feeling of foul play and want of faith had been created which it was impossible to eradicate.* \> * A totally unexpected occurrence is seldom fairly judged at the moment, and Davis's generous sensibility pained and wounded some of his friends. They thought he had lowered himself, and their affection for him made them angry. MacNevin wrote to O'Brien that rather than submit to the tyranny over individual opinion exercised in this controversy he would retire from public life. " As for Davis I know not what to say ' exit Tilburina in tears.' What was there in the vulgar assault made on himself and his friends to authorise these pearly drops or this quivering emotion p " (Cahermoyle Correspondence.) Denny Lane, writing to Davis himself, implied the same. sort of objection. " Your conduct at the Hall," he said, " except ' the tears ' was unimpeachable. The attack on you was altogether unexpected and undeserved. You did nothing to provoke a collision, the only thing which I can find fault with was your manner in the Com- mittee to O'Connell which I was informed of by a person who could scarcely be mistaken in a matter of the kind. This was the real cause of the split, it made O'Connell anxious to abuse you if he could. He has many faults, but we must take him as he is he is the wit he that binds together the bundle of twigs. . . ." (Davis Papers.) And for myself I cannot remember without a sting of shame that when I next met my friend I saluted him by reciting in a bantering tone the burden of a song in the Spirit of the Nation " We must not weep for you dear land, We must not weep for you ! " We were thinking too much of the humiliation of our comrade, Davis was overwhelmed by the risk to the public cause. The weekly censor who has always taken so liberal and humane a view THE PROVINCIAL COLLEGES. 713 XOTE ON CHAPTER VII. RESOLUTIONS AND MEMORIAL OF THE CATHOLIC BISHOPS ox THE COLLEGES BILL. At a meeting of the Prelates of Ireland, convened in the Presbytery House, Marlborough Street, Dublin, 23rd May, 1845, His Grace the Most Rev. Dr. Murray hi the chair, the following resolution was unanimously adopted. Moved by the Most Rev. Dr. Slattery ; seconded by the Most Rev. Dr. Mac Hale; Resolved: " That having maturely considered the bill now pending before Parliament for the extension of academical education in Ireland, and giving credit to Her Majesty's Government for their kind and generous intentions, manifested in the endowment of the College of Mayuooth, we find ourselves compelled by a sense of duty to declare, that, anxious as we are to extend the advantages of education, we cannot give our approbation to the proposed system, as we deem it dangerous to the faith and morals of the Catholic pupils." Moved by the Most Rev. Dr. Crolly ; seconded by the Right Rev. Dr. Ryan ; Resolved: " That therefore a respectful memorial, suggesting and soliciting such amendments in the said bill, as may be calculated to secure the faith and morals of the Students, be presented to his Excellency the Lord-Lieutenant, praying his Excellency to forward same to Her Majesty's Government, and support its prayer with the weight of his influence." To His Excellency Lord Heytesbury, Lord-Lieutenant General and General Governor of Ireland. The Memorial of the Roman Catholic Archbishops and Bishops of Ireland Humbly Sheweth That Memorialists are disposed to co-operate, on fair and reasonable terms, with Her Majesty's Government and the Legislature, in establishing a system for the further extension of acade- mical education in Ireland. That the circumstances of the present population of Ireland afford plain evidence that a large majority of the students belonging to the middle classes will be Roman Catholics; and Memorialists, as their spiritual pastors, consider it their indispensable duty to secure to the utmost of their power the most effectual means of protecting the faith and morals of the Students in the new Colleges, which are to be erected for their better education. That a fair proportion of the professors, and other office-bearers in the new Colleges, should be members of the Roman Catholic Church, whose moral conduct shall have been properly certified by testimonials of character, signed by their respective prelates. And that all the office-bearers in those Colleges should be appointed by a board of trustees, of which the Roman of Irish affairs, interposed with a letter from Mr. Punch (of Punch) to Mr. Davis (of the Nation) in which the latter was graciously assured that since Marat there had not been so objectionable a person ; and turned into contemptuous ridicule for presuming to maintain his conviction against Mr. O'Coimell. 714 YOUNG IRELAND. Catholic prelates of the provinces iu which any of those colleges should be erected, shall be members. That the Roman Catholic pupils could not attend the lectures on history, logic, metaphysics, moral philosophy, geology, or anatomy, without exposing their faith or morals to imminent danger, unless a Roman Catholic professor will be appointed for each of those chairs. That if any president, vice-president, professor or office-bearer in any of the new colleges, shaD be convicted before the Board of Trustees, of attempting to undermine the faith or injure the morals of any student in those institutions, he shall be immediately removed from his office by the same board. That as it is not contemplated that the students shall be provided with lodging in the new colleges, there shall be a Roman Catholic chaplain to superintend the moral and religious instruction of the Roman Catholic students belonging to each of those colleges ; that the appointment of each chaplain, with a suitable salary, shall be made on the recommendation of the Roman Catholic Bishop of the diocese in which the college is situate, and that the same prelate shall have full power and authority to remove such Roman Catholic chaplain from his situation. Signed on behalf of the meeting, D. MURRAY, Chairman. CHAPTER VIII. THE OPPOSITION TO THE BILL. AN agreement was come to, in the Association, that O'Connell and Smith O'Brien should attend the House of Commons to demand amendments in the Colleges Bill. It seems probable that amendments, substantially yield- ing the chief points insisted upon in the Bishops' memorial, might have been obtained. With our sub- sequent knowledge of Sir Robert Peel's career, it is safe to assume that he was willing to make as large concessions as the prejudices of his supporters would permit. In the previous session he had given signifi- cant evidence of his good dispositions by making through the Executive a concession which the House of Com- mons could scarcely have been induced to sanction. His Charitable Bequests Act provided that when it was necessary to determine who was the actual holder of any Catholic benefice to which a bequest was made, the determination should be entrusted exclusively to the Catholic Bishops and Catholic laymen among the Commissioners. It was passionately objected by certain Catholic theologians that this provision interfered with the rights of the diocesan, to whom the decision canonically belongs. To meet this objection the Irish 71 (J YOUNG IRELAXD. Attorney General was instructed to frame a regulation under which the Commission were required to accept the report of the diocesan as final evidence of the fact ; and this concessionary regulation was adopted. The May- nooth Act had afterwards given complete satisfaction by its scrupulous respect for Catholic feeling, and there was no reason to doubt that he would bring the same temper to the present measure, which was framed with the same object, of conciliating the Irish people. But his difficulties with his supporters were greatly increased by the unmeasured censure to which the bill had been subjected. If it were predetermined to reject it, unmeasured censure was permissible ; but if amendments were contemplated, it was an obvious rule of prudence to insist only on such concessions as it might be possible to carry through Parliament, and not to ask them in terms which should increase the difficulty of obtaining them. During this critical interval Davis laboured without stint to preserve peace, and to save the national cause. ''O'Connell goes over [to London] to-night [Sunday 15 June] " he wrote to O'Brien, already in London " and so much the better. The effort of the Repeal members (to amend the Bill) should be made with all their force. It is also desirable that he should be removed for a while from the persons who suggest suspicions, alarm his Catholic feelings, and stimu- late his large but vehement soul. ""Tis marvellous what evil influence such little creatures can exercise over so great a mind. We had a most serious affair in Committee yesterday, in which all Protestants who interfered in the Education question were denounced in the strongest courteous language by O'Connell and THE OPPOSITION TO THE BILL. 717 his son, and by other parties in a rougher fashion. O'Connell seemed anxious that the supporters of mixed Education should secede from the Association ; but none of us did so, nor ought we under any circumstances short of impending expulsion. We have the same right to be in the Association as any others, and no person ought on the principles of the Association force on any question, except Repeal, against the will of any considerable body of active members. However if there is to be a break up, the longer 'tis postponed the better ; and you should on no account be absent whenever O'Connell brings the question to such an issue, as he threatens to do on his return from London. In such a case, dignified, cool, firm combined action may enable us to avert disaster from our cause and country. The subject is not to be raised in the Association till O'Connell's return. He or his son has forwarded petitions plump against the bill to the country." Some impatient spirits persuaded that a conspiracy to drive them out was formed wished to anticipate it by a secession, but against this course Davis stood firm. Two days later he again wrote to O'Brien.* " O'Loghlen [Sir Colman] and all whom I have consulted are firm against secession. O'Loghlen proposes and I agree with him fully, that if O'Connell on his return should force the question on Conciliation Hall, an amendment should be moved that the introduction of such a question against the wish of a numerous and respectable portion of the Committee is contrary to the principles of the Association, and likely to injure the cause of Repeal. A steady elaborate discussion for a number of days would end in the withdrawal of the motion and amend- ment, or in rendering the motion if carried powerless. An explanation would follow and the cause would still be safe. Secession would give Ireland up without a contest to the bigots ; it would besides be criminal and hardly honourable to secede, as * Cahermoyle Correspondence, June 17th. 718 YOUNG IS EL AND. if forsooth we had joined a retinue, not a free league, and could take up our hats and abandon the cause on receiving' offence or injustice. . . . Once this peril is over all will be safe." Much as he desired a good measure he knew it might be bought too dearly. A few days later he says, " I have been, and am, doing all in my power to prevent the injurious results of the differences on the Colleges Bill, and have been fortunate enough to put an end to a discussion in Committee which was tending 1 O fast to mischief. In my mind any advantages to be derived from the bill are not worth even a moment's division amongst us." John O'Connell's design, though necessarily sus- pected from the incidents all pointing in one direction, was only suspected. But Davis could no longer shut out of his calculations the possibility of resolutions being proposed to which he and his friends must refuse their assent. " I will not interfere again till an attempt be made to pledge the Association to evil resolutions. If the O'Connells wish they can ruin the agitation (not the country) in spite of any one. Between unaccounted funds, bigotry, billingsgate, Tom Steele missions, crude and contradictory dogmas, and unrelieved stu- pidity, any cause and any system could be ruined. America too, from whence arose ' the cloud in the west ' which alarmed Peel, has been deeply offended, and but for the Nation there would not now be one Repeal Club in America. Still we have a sincere and numerous people, a rising literature, an increasing state of young honest trained men, Peel's splitting policy [a policy which split up the Tories], the chance of war, the chance of the Orangemen .* Cahermoyle Correspondence, June 21st. THE OPPOSITION TO TEE BILL. 71 and a great, thought now misused, organisation ; and perhaps next Autumn a rally may be made. It will require forethought, close union, indifference to personal attack and firm measures. At this moment the attempt would utterly fail ; but parties may be brought down to reason by the next four months. Again I tell you, you have no notion of the loss sustained by John O'ConnelFs course. A dogged temper and a point of honour induce me to remain in the Association at every sort of sacrifice, and will keep me there while there is a chance, even a remote one, of doing good in it.-" * O'Brien replied in terms very characteristic of the man. He suspected that he, and those who shared his opinions, had been placed in a false position, when they promised such unmeasured resistance, unless certain provisions of the bill were altered ; hut at all hazards they must he faithful to their promise. "It is quite true that the tone taken by John O'Connell has done infinite mischief, and upon this point I have not concealed my opinion from him. But I am not disposed on that account to despond. 'The care which ought to be taken by the friends of mixed education with regard to the matter should not be less firm because we do not agree with the sentiments which he has put forward. We have declared that we would repudiate the College Scheme unless it gave security to religious men of al,l parties, that religion should not be excluded wholly from these institutions and unless public visiting and public liberty should be protected from the corrupt influences of such extensive Government patronage. Whilst therefore no practical difference now arises between us and the separate educationists, we are in my opinion bound to sustain them in their opposition on these grounds on which we have ourselves (whether wisely or not is not now the question) proclaimed our opposition to the measure." * Cahermoyle Correspondence, June 26th. 720 YOUNG IRELAND. Davis wrote to Lane with a completer unreserve than to O'Brien. At the outset he said : " Should the Catholic Bishops go strongly against mixed education, or should Government persist in claiming the nomina- tion and dismissal of the professors, the plan must fail. The latter danger is the greater, as by what I hear the best of the Bishops are with us. Should the plan be freed from Govern- ment despotism and be carried out, we shall have first a home provision for a literary and scientific class ; second, security for an educated middle and upper class in four or five years ; third, we shall have got over the last subject, short of fighting which could break up the party. Our after-course will have only front foes, and I don't care for them/' Referring to Lane's complaint that he had been too brusque in his manner of resisting opposition in Com- mittee, he in the language of pleading " confessed and avoided : " " In Committee (which I find more powerful than you sup- pose) J. O'C. has been severely lectured by O'Brien and re- proved by all the Catholic bar. In truth, Clements O'Dowd, Costello, Drs. Nagle and Murphy are the only supporters of separate education among us now, for Broune is on ' mission ' and Conway is below par. What you say of my general manner is I fear quite true. I lose patience with the lying ignorant and lazy clan who surround O'C. Indeed I have to maintain a perpetual struggle to prevent myself from quitting politics in absolute scorn ; but my heart melts and I think it possible for a union of brave patient men to lift up the country in more ways than politics. But till the ' Scene ' in Concilia- tion Hall, O'C. and I were most courteous in manner to each other though frequently opposed in opinion. By the way, O'C. is not sincere for separate education. In the absence of the O'C/s last autumn, O'Neil Daunt and I prepared by order of the THE OPPOSITION TO THE BILL. 7i>L Committee resolutions positively for mixed education. Thev were passed unanimously by both Committees, O'Brien in the chair. On Johnny's first appearance in the Committee they were read to Jiim, and he gave them a flat negative, saying he wished Roman Catholic education to be under the Jesuits. In half an ,hour after O'Connell came in, heard them and said, 'I have been for years and still am an advocate for mixed education.' He then went on to say that it would be right to consult the Bishops. In a few days after he recanted this opinion under (we have no doubt) Johnny's influence. I never intended to notice the attack in the Pilot, though it and the Ncwry Examiner keep constantly at me and the Nation. The regard to O'B. is all assumed, as I could prove to you. He was within an ace of leaving the Hall on Monday during Johnny's speech." Meantime the two parties to the controversy were busy through the press and public meeting, promoting their respective views in a legitimate manner. The Archbishop of Tuam in a letter to Sir Robert Peel utterly condemned the bill. On the other side a petition was, prepared in Dublin and signed by the most conspicuous citizens, outside the Tory party, giving ic a conditional support. The petitioners admitted that the proposal to educate students of different creeds together, and to leave open the honours and emoluments to persons of all religious denominations, would tend to ' promote charity and extinguish religious feuds iu Ireland. But the measure was defective in not pro- viding religious instruction for youth removed from the care of their parents ; and in giving the selection and control of the professors to the Crown.* Among the * For Petition and signatures sec Nation, June 14th. Regarding this petition, Davis wrote to Lane : " I am glad you like my petition. If any- thing could change my mixed feeling of admiration and censure of U U 722 YOUNG IRELAND. petitioners were the Young Irelanders who were already committed to the principles it advocated, and a few professional men who afterwards became officers of the Colleges, and may possibly have had an interested motive even at this stage. But they included others whose names furnish significant evidence that the feeling in favour of the measure among the educated class was deep and general. In the final disruption of the Associa- tion a year later the barristers who took part with O'Connell were James O'Hea, Francis Brady, Robert Mullin, Robert Ferguson, Joseph Henry Dunne, and William Gernon, and all these were among the petitioners. So likewise were two other barristers afterwards selected by the Catholic Bishops to be pro- fessors of the Catholic University, John O'Hagan and D. F. McCarthy ; and a considerable number of Catholic gentlemen who were subsequently chosen to represent Catholic constituencies in Parliament, among whom were Thomas O'Hagan, Horace Fitzgerald, Robert Potter, W. H. Cogan, Denis Caulfield Heron, Sir Colman O'Loghlen, Sir Dominic Corrigan, and Sir Timothy O'Brien. The question for which O'Connell was contending was not separate education ; that point he was still willing to yield. In a private note to the Archbishop of Tuam O'Connell into genuine hostility, it would be the vicious adulation and lying incentives proffered to him by the little, stupid, mercenary devils about him, and his patronage of the vilest and the weakest of them. They are trying to drive O'Brien, myself, and others to a secession, hoping to have the uncensured handling of public money with their gluey claws ; but they shall be disappointed and beaten. . . . You would like Dublin much better than when last here." Davis to Lane. THE OPPOSITION TO THE BILL. 723 early in the contest he said, " It is possible, though not very probable, that the appointment of professors to instruct the Catholic youth may be given to the Catholic prelates, and in that case though the principle of exclusive Catholic education may not apply, yet I should think there would be no objection to Protestants attending the classes if all the professors were nominated by the canonical authorities of the Catholic Church."* Before leaving for the House of Commons he advised the same prelate, who was the leader of the party of resistance among the Bishops, to yield nothing of their demand, f " If the prelates take and continue a high firm and unanimous tone," he said, " the Ministry will yield. Believe me they are ready to yield ; you have everything in your own power." That a statesman who had long taught his countrymen that Parliament would yield nothing to Irish claims, should have given such counsel would be marvellous, if we did not know that his great intellect was paralysed, and that to hinder the Tories and help the Whigs had been his policy for a decade. The result of his counsel was that no arrangement was arrived at. The Bishops had a second meeting when a new petition was prepared but rejected, and they separated without coming to any decision. The Government made several concessions, and refused several. With respect to the nomination of Professors, the State must appoint in the first instance, that the * Private letter to Dr. McHale. Dated 19th Feb., '45, published in Miss Cusack's Life of the Liberator. t Published in Miss Cusack's Life of the Liberator. The letter was dated June 21st, '45. r u 2 724 YOUNG IRELAND. proportion among the churches might be fairly regulated, but they were willing to provide that after an experi- ment of three years Parliament should review the system and adopt any preferable one. To protect the morals of the students the lodsrino- houses would receive O t) licenses annually from the Visitors, which might be revoked by the same authority. The Board of Works would be empowered to lend money for the purpose of erecting halls where the students might receive religious instruction according to the tenets of their church, and the Principals of those halls would be appointed by the Visitors. A salary would not be granted to those officers, as religious endowment was contrary to the principles of the bill, but the Government were persuaded that wealthy Catholics and Protestants would contribute the necessary salary. In selecting the Visitors, the heads of the religious bodies in the district where the college was placed would be included. After a week's attendance in Parliament O'Connell and Mr. John O'Connell returned to Ireland and announced that they had failed to effect any amend- ment, and that the bill was hopelessly bad. It passed into law however, and the Catholic Primate announced his intention of giving it a fair trial,* and the Bishops in Cork, Galway, and Belfast, where the new colleges were placed, took the same course. A little later, when a change of government took place, the new administration consulted Dr. Crolly and Dr. Murray, and attended scrupulously, it is affirmed, to every suggestion they * Public Meeting at Armagh. THE OPPOSITION TO THE BILL. 725 made for securing the religious instruction and moral conduct of the Catholic students.* They were prepared to revise the statutes of the colleges on the same instiga- tion. But the majority. of the bishops held aloof, and in time they all withdrew their support under instructions from the Propaganda. The result has been that during two generations a section of the Catholic youth have been educated in a system disapproved of by their reli- gious Superiors ; another section have been educated in Trinity College, a purely Protestant foundation ; and a large section have been entirely deprived of Collegiate training, a calamity perhaps as disastrous as the Famine. It is hard to estimate the suffering and humiliation which have attended the generations since launched into life without requisite discipline. Our ancestors fought with their naked breasts against Norman Knights locked in O O iron, and it is at such odds Ireland still sends her young men to fight the battle of life. Among the friends of the measure it may be that some fixed their eyes too exclusively on the gain of rearing students in friendly intercourse and too little on the danger to faith. But others fixed their eyes too exclusively on victory, and too little on the sacrifice at which it was to be purchased. I have since lived nearly a quarter of a century in a new country where young men flock in quest of fortune, and I have seen troops of bright intelligent young Irishmen forfeit great opportunities, and fall into inferior positions, because their education had been unpractical and defec- tive. And it was impossible to believe that this cala- * Lord Dalling's Life of Lord Palmerston. 726 YOUNG IRELAND. mity might not have been averted, when I saw, in that country, two Universities having none of the provisions on which O'Connell insisted, where the students attend classes together and live where they think fit without ecclesiastical or academic supervision, where there are no separate professors and no separate class of studies, and where on the council of each University there was a Catholic Archbishop. A fairer and better system than the one accepted in Australia might assuredly have been obtained in Ireland in 1845. Peel's third Irish measure was still more unfortunate than the second. It was spoiled by the advice of his Irish supporters ; so hopeless is it to effect good through agents to whom the right is odious and intolerable. Lord Stanley proposed a Land Bill which remedied none of the serious evils the Commission had disclosed. It did not recognise in any manner the costly improvements which the tenantry had already created, and it proposed to grant compensation in the future merely for drains and farm buildings, and this compensation was to be claimable only in case of ejectment. By inference it abolished the Tenant Eight of the North. Davis pre- pared a report on the scheme, and strongly advised O'Connell and O'Brien to take up the interest of the Northern farmers, and thereby gain their good will and finally their co-operation. But before anything was undertaken the measure, which was received with a shout of disapprobation North and South, was with- drawn. Lord Stanley had not succeeded in legislating on the question ; but it is probable that he obtained an THE OPPOSITION TO THE BILL. 727 insight into the unjust and untenable character of the land system in Ireland, for after he succeeded to the management of the family property, he solved the diffi- culty for himself by selling his Irish estates. At this period Davis proposed, for the first time, to go circuit, and the news was not received by his friends with unanimous assent. Dillon wrote to me : " If Davis will not attend two public dinners, I would much rather he would select Sligo than Gal way. Tell him I will write to him from Sligo, and as I would say the same things to both of you, that letter will do for you, and you can shew him this. I was greatly annoyed at hearing a report that he was going' circuit. That I think would be altogether ruinous. Every one would say that he was driven out of politics. I have been think- ing that he and you ought to start a penny magazine, and conduct it yourselves, making use of James Duffy to circulate it. If you would join in the speculation I am certain it should necessarily succeed, and it would be a powerful engine. ' It stands you upon ' to work against the powerful confederacy that has been formed to crush you, and in your person everything that is upright and independent in the country. May God defend the right." On the other hand Denny Lane approved of the design : " I am very glad," he wrote to Davis, " to hear that you are coming down to the Assizes. The going circuit I think more than any thing else can make a man acquainted with the pro- vincial mind of Ireland, which is really of much greater pro- portionate power than the ex-metropolitan mind of any other country. In fact we have no metropolis neither the court of claret-coloured coats, nor that of wigs and gowns is enough to make Dublin anything but a country town. We have no theatre, no periodical literature, no gathering of artists, no great merchants, 728 YOUNG IRELAND. above all no legislative assembly collecting into a focus every ray of intellect and enterprise in the country. In fact we have nothing 1 of what makes Paris or other capitals the ' governor ' of the great engine of a nation." During the Colleges controversy a project of earlier date was carried out. The State Prisoners held a Levee in the Rotunda on the anniversary of their imprison- ment. In the historic Round Room, festive with flags and decorations, O'Connell and his late fellow prisoners, standing on an elevated dais and surrounded by the elite of the national party, received the felicitations of an organised nation. Deputations from the great Munici- palities, from the Commissioners and Gruardians of the lesser towns, from the associated trades, and from the clergy and laity of numerous districts were presented thanking them for their past fidelity, and promising to co-operate with them to the end, in the struggle for nationality. A pledge proposed by Smith O'Brien and seconded by Henry Grrattan was adopted, declaring that the men there assembled (who were in effect a National Convention) would never cease seeking the Repeal of the Union by all peaceful moral and constitutional agencies till a native Parliament was restored.* But Ireland by this time had had demonstrations and pronunciamentos enough and to spare. Perhaps indeed she " protested too much," and became liable to * The meeting on Friday was all our press describes it by far the greatest popular display I ever witnessed under and outside the Rotunda. O'C. interrupted me on Monday week to confuse me, but he only roused and served me. I was famously heard and we are great political friends now. Davis to Maddyn. THE OPPOSITION TO THE BILL. 729 the suspicion which the same exuberance of sentiment suggested in the case of the tragedy Queen. One good result however the Levee produced ; the best men of the national party scattered throughout the four provinces were brought together for a moment in the Capital. They had witnessed O'Connell's assault upon Davis with feelings akin to the despair of the Dutch Protestants when Maurice of Orange, the sword of the Reformation, struck at John of Barnvelt, its brain. They desired to negotiate a permanent peace, and were profuse in good advice to both parties. But they pro- bably took too little account of one agent, without whom peace was now impossible Mr. JohnO'Connell.* * The literary projects were pressed on without regard to the con- troversies in the Association. MacNevin wrote to Lane : " The country is bristling witli books on all sides, Protestant, Orange, mitigated purple, bright green, dark green, and invisible green. We are all writing books such as they are, and all about the ' dear little isle.' Now if wealth and national learning go on together, the devil cannot arrest the progress of our cause for I observed in reading our history, that at every period when fair play was given for a moment to the national mind, it rushed to freedom with a very noble instinct." . CHAPTEE IX. THE VICE-TRIBUNATE OF JOHN o'cONNELL. WHEN the bill passed Autumn had arrived, and in Autumn it was as hopeless to keep the national leaders in Dublin as to keep the House of Commons in Session. O'Connell retired to Darrynane, O'Brien to Cahermoyle, and their principal associates set out for the Ehine or Mont Blanc, or on political expeditions beyond the Bann or the Shannon. Davis had volunteered to allow me a holiday, by taking my place in the Nation office, and my holiday was employed in an excursion through Ulster from Eostrevor to Donegal. An Orange meet- ing on a scale of unusual magnitude was projected at Enniskillen to impeach Peel for his desertion of Protestant ascendancy; and in company with two or three friends I resolved to see this muster of faithful Protestants. My companions were John O'Hagan and two provincial adherents of the Young Ireland party who now first come distinctly into view. During a residence in Belfast from 1839 to 1842, I had made the acquaintance of John Mitchel, a solicitor residing at Banbridge, who impressed me by the vigour and liberality of his opinions, as well as by his culture and suavity. He was the son of a Unitarian Minister, had THE VICE-TRIBUNATE OF JOHN O'CONNELL. 731 been educated at Trinity College, and at this time was under thirty years of age. He was rather above the middle size, well-made and with a face which was thoughtful and comely, though pensive blue eyes and masses of soft brown hair, a stray ringlet of which he had the habit of twining round his finger while he spoke, gave it, perhaps, too feminine a cast. He lived much alone, and this training had left the ordinary results ; he was silent and retiring, slow to speak and apt to deliver his opinion in a form which would be abrupt and dogmatic if it were not relieved by a pleasant smile. He was already happily married, and lived contentedly among his books, in a little village on the pastoral Bann without one associate, of his own sex, for his mind or heart. During his rare visits to Dublin I introduced him to Davis, with whom he was much taken, and though he had not yet given us any effectual assistance as a writer or a speaker, he was reckoned by the young men as one of their reserve. We had shown our estimate of him by placing him on the Council of the Eighty-two Club, and by inviting him to contribute a volume to the Library of Ireland, which after some hesitation he undertook.* * Mitchel had written one review for the Nation (a notice of a pam- phlet on the estates of the London Societies in Ulster, by Mr. Haslet, Mayor of Derry), one letter of no significance, one leading article (Con- victed Conspirators, March 2nd, '44) and half another. The Tatter appeared in No. 33 (May 27th, '44), and is entitled " The Anti-Irish Catholics " (Lord Beaumont, &c.). The first portion was Davis's ; it is MitchePs from the following sentence to the end ; a sentence interesting as marking his opinions at that period. Davis republished in the Voice of the Nation his own portion of the article, omitting the remainder : " In the year 1843 the native country of that servile Lord is still a province, but making a noble struggle for its independence ; violating no human, no divine law ; forming no dark, secret associations, but working by the peaceful might of concen- 732 YOUNG IRELAND. It was with him I had originally planned this expedi- tion and as the time approached he announced himself ready. In the middle of July he wrote from Ban- bridge : " Did I not predict truly of the July weather ? [It was raining cats and dogs.] Surely we shall have a glorious August for this. The assizes and all other attorney work will be at an end (or suspended) hefore the 1st August. So that if you and O'Hagan fix any day about then, and let me know a day or two before, I will meet you in Newry, then we will see Rostrevor and on our way to Banbridge batter and reduce Loughorn but spare the garrison [Loughorn was the residence of Mr. John Martin one of the proposed tourists] and so to Belfast; or else in a north-west direction as may be decided in Solemn Council of War, to be held in Banbridge, over a map of Ireland. " Will none of the rest Dillon, Barry, MacNevin, be per- suaded to join us, even for a part of the time? About the books [the Library of Ireland, of which the first volume had just appeared] Mr. Davis writes to me that he will not have his 'Tone' ready as the advertisement promises, and I have been making some exertion to have 'Aodh O'Neill^ finished soon, to put in its place I fear a sorry substitute. Still if your's [the Ballad Poetry of Ireland] and Mr. Carleton's ' Rody ' are really to be published as announced, I should have time enough, and moreover I should have (which I much desire) your advice upon some passages that Davis rather takes exception to I should hardly say that, but desires me to reconsider and those very passages I am unwilling to alter seeing they are as I conceive justified, both historically and otherwise. It is a delicate period trated opinion alone; collecting in the open day the suffrages of her unarmed and sober millions, under the sanction of religion, and the guidance of religion's anointed Ministers, until every Irishman shall have pronounced his opinion whether his country shall be once more a nation or not." The articles in the Voice of the Nation signed M , which have sometimes been attributed by writers to Mitchel, were written by John Fisher Murray. THE VICE-TRIBUNATE OF JOHN O'CONNELL. 733 that I have fallen upon; and one upon which conciliatory writing is difficult. Besides I confess that I am inclined to ultra vehemence in speaking of that time, and really thought I had restrained myself admirably. But you shall see. " I hope you are in good health and that you will be able for the hills, when we start. For Mrs. Duffy I am almost afraid to ask. -" Be sure to give me warning before you come that I may have a day or two to put my office in order. I hear you have the Battle of Maghrath [one of the publications of the Archa3o- logical Society] and that there is a learned appendix upon Irish Military Standards. Will you lend it to me ? remember to bring it with you." * The excursion began early in August and its aims and enjoyment were a type of the practical and imagi- native characters of the party inspired b}^ Davis. I borrow a brief account of it from a note book of the period : " O'H. and I rested at Drogheda, where we fought the battle [of the Boyne] over again, map in hand, then proceeded to Lurgan Green where a Scotch engineer had conquered a tract from the sea at a cost which makes it feasible to have the same result repeated in many places ; thence to inspect the Catholic church of Dundalk [the most successful of the Gothic revivals which had recently begun], and on to Faughart where tradition declares Edward Bruce lies buried after his disastrous Irish campaign. Next day to the old keep of Narrowwater, over Ferry hill where the divine bay of Rostrevor lying between guardian mountains, with Carlingford and Cooley on the right, and on the left Mourne and Warrenpoint might realise a painter's dream of ideal beauty. * The appendix on Military Standards probably did not supply the necessary light ; for I find that Davis at that time applied to the greatest living authority on such questions, Mr. George Petrie, for specific infor- mation. His answer which is of permanent interest will be found in a note at the end of this chapter. 734 JOUNG IRELAND. Here our northern friends met us and we spent a day at Kil- broney, a valley in the heart of the Mourne mountains where the bleach-green and beetling mills of Mr. Martin's elder brother renewed our acquaintance [we were all Ulstermen bred among flax and linen] with the most successful of Northern industries. Thence to ' castle-filled Carlingf ord ' where a mediaeval fortress fit to shelter an army sits on a huge rock rising perpendicularly out of the sea, unapproachable except by the flattest and lightest boats, and still seems to guard, as of old, the ' Pass of the North/ At Loughorn we made another pause. Mr. Martin the eldest of the party is a gentleman farmer of unusual culture [but whose gentle manners and feeble health gave little promise of political action. He had been Mitchel's schoolfellow and his life then and thereafter was undoubtedly ruled by this fact] . From Loughorn our course to Bryansford lay through a district which, after seven generations, still bore the character impressed upon it by the Plantation under James I. There were Catholic districts and Protestant districts, Protestant towns and Catholic towns like Rathfriland and Hilltown, and the original popu- lation who had been driven from the rich valleys to the soil which the ' plantators ' disdained, were still known as the 1 mountainy men/ At Fofaney we found the name of the National School painted in the Irish character, and vowed to have this example followed in the Repeal Reading Rooms. At Bryans- ford [the residence of Lord Roden] , the leader of the Orangemen has made himself a home of matchless beauty, in an ancient seat of the O'Neill's, and what is better established an hotel which is [in those days] a model of comfort and convenience. I can scarcely record without silent laughter and some self reproach the incidents at Bryansford. You are required to write your name in a book at the lodge before entering Lord Roden's do- main, and two of the travellers, against the plaintive remon- strance of their comrades, insisted upon entering themselves as Aodh O'Neil of Tyreoghen, and Roger O'More of Leix, two historic names malign to the house of Jocelyn. When we returned to an excellent dinner we found on every toilet table a Pro- THE VICE-TRIBUNATE OF JOHN O'CONNELL. 735 testant bible conspicuously displayed. [Lord Roden was one of the modern saints.] One of us called attention to the fact and vowed he would not let Lord Roden thrust his bible upon him,, till he asked for it. Certainly not, said Mitchel ; I'll ring the bell and order the waiter to carry them off forthwith. Martin, who acted as general peacemaker insisted that the bibles were doing us no hurt, that we were not forced to read them, that Lord Roden meant well, and so forth, which produced small results, till at length he urged a final motion in arrest of judgment. ' Well, for my part/ he said, ' I want to read a chapter before I go to sleep/ The idea of a bible on every toilet table of four being necessary to enable our friend to read his chapter was so irresistible, that we broke into a chorus of laughter, and compromised the case by piling all the bibles on Martin's table for his personal comfort. From Bryansford we went to Newcastle, and ascended Slievedonard. " As we mounted a mist came plump down, through which we could not see three yards, but we toiled on towards the summit. After a little it drifted away almost as rapidly as the lifting of a curtain, and disclosed a scene which none of us will ever forget. The whole Mourne chain lay beneath us, and out of the valleys the mist was steaming up as from huge cauldrons. The sea \vas a dazzling spectacle ; a shower of rain turned a stretch of the bay from deep blue to jet black, while nearer the shore it became emerald green, and the harbour of Dundrum seemed to rise silver white out of the brown plains, to meet the changing sky. Through the breaks of the mountain we could discern in the distance the lough of Carlingford and the bay of Dundalk. The mists as they rose flew about the mountain, now chasing each other round its base, now hooding its head in darkness. During the entire period of our slow descent, it was raining in some part of the vast plain exposed to our view, and the contest between the sun and the storm looked like a pitched battle of Pagan Gods. A vast army of clouds would take possession of a town, and pour a fierce storm of rain upon it ; suddenly the sun would be seen advancing in its rear and driving it to sea. Presently the rain would rally round some hill top, and the clouds flocked to J 736 YOUNG IRELAND. this new rendezvous, leaving- the former battle field in possession of the enemy. Again when the sun would seem to be in com- plete command of a town, a reinforcement of heavy clouds would rush round a mountain spur and beat back the sunshine. We watched the conflict with constant interest, though occasionally flying parties of the rain took us in flank and galled us con- siderably. " We pursued our journey by way of Dundrum where John de Courcy erected one of the castles through which that great Norman soldier held his grasp on the North, and made our way to Down Patrick where Thomas Russell,, the friend of Wolfe Tone and the ally of Robert Emmet, lies buried in the parish church; and where an unprotected sod, which the piety of pilgrims constantly diminishes, is shown as the grave of St. Patrick. The day ordinarily finished with refreshment for mind and body which we fell into the habit of distinguishing as ' Tea and Thomas ' Thomas being the philosopher of Chelsea [whom we all loved for having taught so well to scorn pretence and hold by truth and duty, without sharing one in twenty of his opinions on men or events]. While we were sipping the social beverage, and listening to Sartor Resartus read aloud by one of us, in an inn at Down Patrick one evening, a dapper little Cockney commercial traveller in stress of accommodation was shown into our sitting room, and served with brandy and water at a table apart. After listening in mute amazement for a quarter of an hour he could stand it no longer. ' Forgive me gentlemen,' he said, ' for interrupting you, but you don't mean to say that all that blessed nonsense is printed in that book/ When he was assured that it was so set down in the record, he requested to be told the name of the author. ' Carlyle ! ' he said, 'Ah! I am not surprised at that fellow. I often saw his shop in Fleet Street with the devil in one window and a bishop in the other/ Some of us intimated that his Carlisle and the author of Sartor Resartus were not identical, any more than the Solomon who had recently been convicted as a ' fence ' was identical with the personage of the same name who built THE VICE-TRIBUNATE OF JOHN O'CONNELL. 737 the Temple of Jerusalem ; but it was in vain. " Ah/' he repeated, " I saw his shop in Fleet Street, with my own eyes, and there was a bishop in one window and the devil in the other." From Downpatrick we went to Ballynahinch, where in '98 the United Irishmen, Presbyterian and Catholic, fought against the English troops for six hours ; a man named Innes, who had carried a pike that day, was still living and showed us the battle- field. Thence along the river, whose low hills were covered with white and brown linen, to Banbridge, where Mitchel resided. Next morning two of us went to mass in the village chapel, and saw a scene singularly solemn and impressive. A venerable old man, whose head I thought I would recognise as the head of a Christian bishop if I met it in an African desert,* was receiving a public offender back into the Church. He questioned him as to the sincerity of his repentance, then prayed over him and exhorted the congregation, in language wonderfully impressive, to be charitable to their erring brother, as they too might fall. From Banbridge we passed through the pleasant orchards and farm-yards of Armagh, to the ecclesiastical capital where the Protestant Primate had spent thirty thousand pounds to re-edify the ancient Cathedral, and the Catholic Primate was engaged in planning a new cathedral which it was said would throw it into the shade ; and on to Enniskillen, where the Orangemen were to bring Peel to judgment for his backsliding. But the pleasure of the day was turned into gloom whenever we fell in with the Dublin newspapers. In the absence of the legitimate leaders Mr. John O'Connell was in undisputed control of the Association, and was deliberately destroying the labour of years, and the hopes of a generation. He played the part of dictator at that time with a dogmatism which his great father after a life of public services rarely assumed. At every * Right Rev. Dr. Blake of Dromore. V V 738 YOUNG IRELAND. meeting the chair, which used to be an object of honest ambition, was occupied by some of his private retinue ; and at every meeting there was some personal conflict or some gross violation of the neutrality on which the Association rested. One day a respectable solicitor who had been engaged in the Great Clare Election of 1829, and constantly afterwards in public affairs, was asked " how dare he come there" to controvert an opinion of Mr. John O'Connell's on the question of negro slavery.* Another day was occupied with an angry contest over the private affairs of the Dublin Corporation. The comments of the English press on the Hol} r See, the proceedings of a body of dissenters who called them- selves the German Catholic Church, were in turn de- bated at great length. But the climax was reached when he occupied the Association for half an hour with a denunciation of a Whig newspaper for having referred disrespectfully " to an adorable relic, an unseamed gar- ment exhibited at Treves, supposed to have been worn by the blessed Redeemer during His Passion" the authenticity of which however was not a fundamental principle of the Repeal Association. His first escapade came to hand as we sat down at Mr. Mitchel's table for the first time, and for some of us dinner was at an end. Each week brought new troubles, and though youth is not easily depressed, for a day after the .receipt of fresh * Mr. Richard Scott of Ennis. Mr. Scott observed that he condemned slavery as much as any one, but there was an Anti-Slavery.Society which met at the Royal Exchange, and he considered that platform, not Conciliation Hall, the proper place for denouncing it. The present time, when there was a cloud in the West, was not a fit one for gratuitous interference in American affairs. THE VICE-TRIBUNATE OF JOHN O'CONNELL. 73