Sodom, alluring to the eye, bitter and poisonous to the palate. Ireland cannot stand alone. Would to God that there was moderation and justice enough in the great states to permit lesser states to enjoy their independence and to prosecute their interests in a state of separation from them! But in the present condition of Christian morality this is a system of politics more to be wished for than expected. Ireland cannot stand alone; she must of necessity be connected, nay, she must be united either to Great Britain or to France: she is. not, indeed, at liberty to make her choice without withdrawing that allegiance which we are convinced the best and wisest men in Ireland have no disposition to withdraw; but if she were unfettered by any bond of connection--at full liberty to make her choice, is there a man in all Ireland with a good heart and a cool head who could hesitate in preferring a union with Great Britain to one with France ?"

"Is there a man in all Ireland with a good heart and a cool head?" Oh question, now, as fifty years ago, perplexing to the last extremity to be answered! Cool heads or hot heads, however, there are very few, if any, who now would advocate the entire separation of Ireland from England, much less her union with France. On the contrary, the professions of loyalty to the crown are ostentatiously loud; as if the repealers were inwardly conscious that the charges of their opponents were, to some extent at least, well founded-that the repeal of the Union would lead to the disruption of all connection between the two islands, whether such a consummation were contem plated or not by the repealers themselves. Some attention, it is true, has been of late attracted by the expressions employed by American democrats, but they have not been very warmly

received.

These views must have presented themselves to O'Connell's mind if he cast one thought upon the present circumstances of affairs, or on their future consequences when he undertook his mission of repeal. They can hardly be new to any repealer of the present day who has not shut his ears to the narrative of history and to the arguments of reason. In a choice of evils, certainly, choose the least; but the agitation which he preferred is so great an evil, so destructive in its immediate effects, so fatal in its possible results, so indefinite in its duration, that the evil to which such an agitation was deliberately preferred must be gigantic indeed. What would be the surprise of an enlightened politician, removed from the strife of party, to learn that the Union sought to be removed by this agitation was denied by the majority, the very large majority of those interested, to be a cause of the grievances complained of?-to learn that that Union was, on the contrary, believed by the majority to be a protection and an assistance to the weaker country, and that

the arguments by which it was sought to connect those grievances were, in many instances, strained in reasoning and false in statements of facts?-that in many instances they were preposterously out of place; and, what is most suspicious, that, from the character of the agitators, from the means they employed, the language they held, full of impotent promises and as impotent threats, and the influence and pecuniary advantages they derived from the agitation itself, there was room to attribute their conduct to motives of the most sordid character? But let an author be heard on this point, speaking to O'Connell's views and motives, whose knowledge of the country and the people of Ireland renders his a voice potential on the question:

"Let no one think that O'Connell had no opinions in favour of repeal. It is probably the truth that he cared nearly as much for repeal as for emancipation. The Catholic question was to him rather Irish than liberal, and repeal was in his eyes only another sort of Catholic emancipation. He had some convictions, strong ambition, and was rather reckless how he gratified that ambition. Such, perhaps, is a fair account of his state of mind in 1829. However, the country received his new announcement with great coldness, and no one could believe he was serious in taking up repeal. His conduct was condemned by a large portion of the Catholic body. But O'Connell knew Ireland well, and, possessing a thorough knowledge of the means by which the passions of his countrymen are roused, resolved that every grievance should be connected with the cause of repeal. Every wrong act of the government he determined to convert into an argument for the necessity of an independent parliament. Having once planned his campaign, there was no great difficulty to a man of his matchless popular powers in carrying his designs into immediate execution, so far at least as to excite an agitation of which he should be the presiding spirit."

1

Long accustomed to popular tumult and to popular sway, O'Connell could not contemplate unmoved the term when Catholic Emancipation should take away from him the groundwork of his agitation; and we find him even in the moment of exultation and of success, bringing forward in very plain terms the new and indeed the only other subject which should continue to engross his attention and the nation's. In his address to the electors of Clare previous to his first election for that county in 1829, he intimated his intention to bring the question of the Repeal of the Union before the consideration of the legislature at the earliest possible period. And a similar paragraph appears in the address to the electors previous to his reelection. These are the earliest public indications of the new

Ireland and its Rulers, vol. ii. p. 59.

topic which was to convulse Ireland. The earliest speech he made on the subject was at a meeting in Dublin previous to his re-election in the month of June, 1829, when he insisted at length on the necessity for a separate parliament in College Green. And shortly afterwards, at the Corn Exchange, he began that extraordinary system of promises, the popular belief in which no disappointment seemed to stagger, by prophesying "that there would within three years be an Irish parliament in College Green."

It has been remarked by a writer already referred to, that throughout the long series of alternate popular triumph and popular defeat, from the time of the United Irishmen, through the battle of the Union, up to the close of the year 1829, the Irish populace had always had a strong feeling towards the aristocracy. There was always a leniency to the faults and a hearty acknowledgment and pride in the virtues of the "real gentleman," the man of station and connexions, that was never shown by the people to one of themselves. And it forms accordingly one of his most serious grounds of accusation against the Irish aristocracy, that they have, notwithstanding this bias in their favour, completely lost all the advantage which the prestige of station, the influence of wealth and connection, and superiority of education, have given and secured to the upper classes in other nations, in which the people were not nearly so ready as in Ireland to admit any superiority of pretension. Whatever justice there may be in this accusation it had no place until after the commencement of the new agitation. At the election of 1832 the change in popular feeling was sufficiently manifest. The old families that had in every state of popular excitement retained their family boroughs as securely as their family titles, were at once brought rudely to a dead stop. Nay, men that had served long and gallantly in the Catholic cause,-men whose names appear in the forlorn hope in the first years of the Catholic Association, met with defeat now, in the earliest years of Catholic freedom, at the hands of Protestant opponents. Thus Feargus O'Connor (who then emerged at once from obscurity into the din of partisanship, when he -like a comet, from his horrid hair

Shook pestilence and war-)

an unknown, untried man, and a Protestant, successfully contested the great county of Cork-a constituency which in Ireland answers to the West Riding in England-against W. Roche, a Catholic of the first families in the county. It was in that same election too, and on the same Repeal cry, that W. Roche,

a Protestant, defeated Barry, one of the Catholic Association, for the city of Limerick. In a word, at the elections of 1832 the only test of the popularity of a candidate was his opinion on the question of Repeal; and the religion of a candidate, or his disposition on religious questions, once the all-important interrogatory, his station in life and his previous opinions, sank into comparative insignificance.

That the mere Repeal of the Union itself was esteemed of minor importance by those who led the cry in pursuit of it, may well be believed. At the county of Waterford election in 1833, Mr. Villiers elicited from Sir R. Keane the too-candid expression "I will hold the Repeal question as an imposing weapon to get justice for Ireland." And although Repealers could not be always thrown off their guard sufficiently to profess the same views, there could never be much doubt that such were the views of many, if not all, of the principal leaders, intending, under the specious expression of "justice to Ireland," the extinction of tithes, the extension of the franchise, corporation reform, &c. But these objects ought to have been openly avowed and demanded. Even if they had been refused, as would most probably have been the case with some if not all of the demands, it would have been mere childishness on that account to dissolve the Union. The cry of Repeal is in fact precisely the "Then I won't play" of a sulky schoolboy. If you object to abolish tithes, "Oh, then we'll have Repeal !" is the observation. "How's that, umpire?"—"Out." "Then I won't play." But much more preposterous conduct was it to hold the question in terrorem over England, as the more intelligent Repealers without question intended, thinking it a wise plan to try to frighten the Imperial government into such indefinite concessions as the promise to do justice to Ireland would amount to. Justice to Ireland! and demanded in louder tones than even they had ever used by the very men whose voices had scarcely ceased from describing the peace and tranquillity which would follow the grant of Catholic Emancipation! So far from either frightening England or making her feel liberal towards Ireland, the agitation only served to excite mistrust and disgust. The No Popery cry, which was beginning to subside, again rose more vigorous than at first; and not the cry only, but the anti-Popery spirit took firmer hold and a wider range, aud remains in increased strength to the present day. So great were the disappointment and disgust at the insincerity of the Catholic leaders.

Since the time of Wolsey no statesman's fall has been so full of moral as O'Connell's: not Napoleon's. Had he suddenly

died four years sooner, every one would have felt that beyond question or comparison the first political power in Europe had departed, and the balance of parties would have rocked to and fro, and the Stock Exchange would have been convulsed. But when he expired last May curiosity was excited, and philosophical philanthropists made stilted funeral orations; friends wept and even his opponents pitied, for no man had more attached friends, and political hatred rarely survives in much bitterness, at least in these days, departed power. And his power had long since departed from between his hands. The result of the government prosecution in 1843-4 had been fatal to him. The confinement, though neither strict nor long, though cheered by the society of friends and varied in its monotony by banquets and sympathizing addresses, was yet irksome in the highest degreeto a man of his ardent temperament and habits of activity amounting to restlessness. Nor could he, though his sentence was reversed at last, conceal from himself nor from his followers that his infallibility, his legal infallibility, had fallen before that of his opponent-the legal vinegar cruet, as he termed him. Although one judge held it to be a fatal defect in the form of his trial that the list of the Dublin grand jurymen had been mutilated-although another held that in point of form a man who had been tried for one sedition could not be condemned for fourteen-it by degrees became perfectly apparent to every understanding that O'Connell had been wrong in point of law and his opponents right, and that whatever informalities had been suffered in that Titanic trial to escape the notice of the Crown lawyers, O'Connell and the traversers had in point of fact committed the acts of which they stood charged, and that in point of law those acts did amount to sedition. As this gained ground the confidence of his followers in the legal knowledge and wary circumspection of the leader sustained a grievous blow. Then came all his broken pledges of success, his breaches of promises to obtain Repeal-breaches more palpable and impossible to be explained away, because he had fallen into the fatal error of committing himself to a given time for the completion of his promise. "He who gains time gains everything," says Baroni to Tancred, but it hardly appears to have been worth gaining so short a time by so great a risk.1 And when

We are irresistibly reminded of the story of the wise Eastern physician, who, being commanded by the Sultaun, upon pain of death, to teach an ass to speak, undertook to do so in a given number of years, and on being remonstrated with for his madness in thus condemning himself to die when those years were out. "Friend," answered the sage, "had I not done so I must have died to-day; now in the years I have obtained, the Sultaun may die, the ass may die, or I myself