the few years of its existence Ireland made greater strides in prosperity than any other country in Europe.

We are not to suppose that England yielded this measure of independence with a hearty good-will. The lion in the jungle relaxes his hold on his prey only to pounce on it again. The government intended to reassert the supremacy of the English Parliament on the first opportunity; and this was soon offered by the Regency question. George III. became insane. Pitt resolved to put the crown, so to speak, in commission, and make the great Seal of England equal to the royal signature; but the Irish Parliament declared the Prince of Wales Regent in the interim. Here was a conflict of authority. Pitt determined this dualism of government should not exist. The doom of the Irish Parliament was sealed. Virtus an dolus quis in hoste requirat? Every means was resorted to. The Catholics were cajoled with the hope of emancipation. The Presbyterians, who were then troublesome in the North, were pacified by the regium donum, or an annual sum voted to support their ecclesiastical college. The Episcopalians were secured by money or peerages; and the obstinate were trampled down by horse, foot, and dragoons. The Act of Union was carried and Ireland in the year 1800 ceased to be a nation.

The spirit of the country seemed broken. The very men whose eloquence in opposition to the Union electrified the people in less than five years, with few exceptions, were either judges or high civil functionaries. O'Connell witnessed all this. He was just entering on his career, being admitted to the bar in 1798. From the very first he resolved on the two great labors of his life,-Catholic emancipation and repeal of the Union. He succeeded in the first, but failed in the second.

It would be presumption in the present writer to attempt to pass judgment on the career of O'Connell. Defunctus amabitur idem was proven in his case. His ablest English opponents eulogized him after death. We were, therefore, surprised at an article in the great Review partly founded by himself, in which it was asserted that with all his ability he was more of a demagogue than a statesman. He is compared to Edmund Burke, and the comparison is unfavorable to O'Connell. He must have studied all Burke's great disquisitions on political philosophy. The stars in the heavens are not jealous because one may be more brilliant than the other. Great men do not feel jealous when their paths do not cross nor interfere with each other; and O'Connell was not jealous of Burke, and certainly he did not follow his example. Whether O'Connell ever could have been a great statesman may be relegated to “the unknowable," because he had no state to administer. Had he had Ireland for the Irish, perhaps he might have exhibited many of the

qualities which the Dublin Review,' as most men do, admires in the great Anglo-Irish statesman. O'Connell discarded philosophical disquisition and deliberately entered on the course of an agitator-a course in which he persevered through good report and evil report to the hour of his death. This he himself assures us in his reply to the Earl of Shrewsbury. At one time his annual professional emoluments were £8000 or nearly $40,000. He says of

himself:

"If I had abandoned politics, even the honors of my profession and its highest stations lay fairly before me. But I dreamt a day-dream-was it a dream?-that Ireland still wanted me; that although the Catholic aristocracy and gentry of Ireland had obtained most valuable advantages from Emancipation, yet the benefits of good government had not reached the great mass of the Irish people, and could not reach them unless the Union should be either made a reality, or else unless that hideous measure should be abrogated.

"I did not hesitate as to my course. My former success gave me personal advantages, which no other man could easily procure. I flung away the profession-I gave its emoluments to the winds-I closed the vista of its honors and dignities-I embraced the cause of my country; and come weal or come woe, I have made a choice at which I have never repined, nor ever shall repent."

Whenever another man arises with O'Connell's powers and selfdevotion to the cause of his country, the days of Home Rule will be nigh.

But though O'Connell was the Gylippus on whom rested the hopes of the Catholics, he received great assistance from distinguished Protestants. Henry Grattan soon after his entrance into the House of Commons became the standard-bearer of their cause; but with all his earnestness he was in many ways unaccommodating towards the very people he labored to emancipate. Grattan, as we learn from his life written by his son, studied closely the great writers of antiquity with a view to bring their experience to bear on the political questions of his day. Yet, notwithstanding all his researches, he could not divest himself of certain fears of his Catholic countrymen. He seemed to overlook the plain truth that allegiance is merely a civil duty; and that loyalty and obedience are all that government need claim from its subjects. He desired to give the government a veto on the appointment of the Bishops, and that Catholic members of Parliament should swear they would not do this thing or that-restricting their actions where others were free; thereby putting them almost in the condition of a delegate from Dakota, who can speak but not vote on questions affecting the interests of his Territory. After Grattan's death, another great advocate of the cause was Lord Plunkett. By one speech he gained. twenty-one votes, a triumph never before obtained in the House of

1 Dublin Review, October, 1875.

Commons. Thus, though exclusion from Parliament was originally wrought by Protestants, the Catholics of Ireland can never forget that it was by Protestant votes their disabilities were removed. But the most effective support O'Connell received was from the great body of the Catholic clergy and independent yeomanry, for there were even then thousands such. At first he stood almost alone. The few Catholic lords and most of the bishops kept aloof; their own social status was tacitly recognized and they scarcely aspired to anything more. For twenty years the burden of the cause was thrown on him; during that period he received only £74 or about $350. But there was the great residuum of patriotism in the parochial clergy and independent farmers. To these he addressed himself, and not in vain. Like Antæus,' his strength was renewed when he touched the mother earth. He needed not to waste his energies in organizing meetings through the country, for they were ready at his hand. Had he had a hundred tongues he could not have addressed them all, for there were over two thousand Catholic churches in Ireland and they were filled every Sunday. When Mass was over, the people resolved themselves into parochial meetings. The Catholic priests were of the people, and several of them were almost rivals of O'Connell in eloquence. Through the instrumentality of these meetings the spirit of the country was roused, bigotry was awed into submission, and emancipation was gained.

O'Connell now rested for awhile. He wished to watch the effects of emancipation on the country. It should be borne in mind that he never aimed at separation. He was too experienced a man to be ensnared in the vagaries of ideal liberty. Pure liberty dwelt once on this globe of ours, but only for a short time, and never will again, except among those whom the Son of Man makes truly free. In political as in other human affairs we must put up with a partial good. The seminal principles of the British Constitution were sown in Catholic times, and it now contains the great safeguards of rational liberty. Most of the ideas embodied in the United States Constitution are borrowed from it. What O'Connell desired was that the spirit and not the letter of the Constitution should be extended to Ireland, that the Union should be one not only of two. countries but a real one of two people, and that its benefits should be felt in Kerry as fully as in Kent. In England the curfew no longer tolls to warn the people to extinguish the light; no, they can lie down or rise when they please, or as their avocations demand. The English delight in manly exercises and the free use of the gun; they can travel by day and by night, and have none to

This figure is applied to O'Connell by Lord Bulwer.

fear but the highway robber. No policeman dare interfere except when armed with a sworn warrant. All these and several other benefits of the Constitution the Englishman claims as his birthright. Why should not the Irish enjoy them just as well, if the Union be a reality? But they do not. The habeas corpus act has been suspended constantly in three-fourths of the country; no man, however law-abiding, can carry a musket unless under the strictest conditions; and any petty constable, who labors to become a sergeant, can enter at any hour of the night and disturb the most helpless family. The excuse was and is, you cannot trust the Irish. Why not? Men do not generally rise against a government that protects and elevates them. "Moralize the laws," said Grattan, "and you moralize the people." Here in America this is simple enough; but the English could not purge themselves of their traditionary' fears and prejudices against the Irish. O'Connell saw

that he should take up the great question of Repeal.

The die was cast. His course was mapped out, and henceforth there was to be no hesitation. He again threw himself on his country, and was greeted with the most wonderful reception known to ancient or modern times. He analyzed the Act of Union, and exposed its enormities. He proved by the speeches of the ablest men in the Irish Parliament that it was in every respect unfair and unjust; in fact that it was a new conquest, and was not binding in conscience, and was to be obeyed only as a matter of expediency. Ireland, which had only a small debt, was forced to bear an unequal share of the enormous English public debt, in the contracting of which she had no part. He demonstrated that Ireland had not a fair representation in the Imperial Parliament. According to the basis of representation in England, in a Parliament of 658 members, Ireland should have at least 178 members, whereas she has only 105. The electoral franchise is also unfairly restricted in Ireland, and remains so to the year of grace 1879, as a few figures from Thom's Official Directory will prove. Mayo with a population of 245,707 has only 3375 Parliamentary electors, while Denbighshire with 84,875 has 7315. The city of Limerick with a population of 49,853 has only 1804 electors; but Bedford (England) with only 16,850 has 2468 electors. Besides, by the Reform Act of 1832 every county in England with more than 50,000 inhabitants got an increase of one member, those counties with more than

'They say it is the fatal destiny of that land that no purposes whatsoever which are for good will prosper or take good effect, which, whether it proceed from the very genius of the soil, or influence of the stars, or that Almighty God hath not yet appointed the time of her reformation, or that He reserveth her in this unquiet state still for some secret scourge which shall by her come unto England, is hard to be known, but yet much to be feared."-Spenser's View, etc.

100,000 inhabitants got an increase of two members. But no such boon was extended to Ireland. These and various other arguments O'Connell employed to stir up the spirit of the people.

When O'Connell commenced the Repeal agitation he was about fifty-eight years old; not too old certainly to discharge the most important affairs of life, but in his special instance it was a great misfortune that he was not twenty years younger. Of the tried friends who stood by him during the long struggle for emancipation, some were dead; many, having secured to themselves the avenue to place and honor, grew cold and fell away; and others, such as Moore, flung the galling shaft of ridicule against him. The Catholic clergy stood faithful; but he was compelled almost to begin anew and gather around him a fresh body of talented men whom he could inspire with his own principles, and in whom he could confide. But this was the work of years, and his years were growing few. O'Connell boasted that he knew the law so well that he could drive a coach through its most difficult and narrowest paths; but he was made to feel that, like the ancient philosopher, he could not argue with a general at the head of forty thousand men. No matter how penetrating and comprehensive the mind of any man may be others will look at things differently, and will dwell on his mistakes. So it happened to O'Connell. Young men seeing his discomfiture began to disregard his counsels as either vacillating or timid. Impatient of restraint and delay, they adopted a different course, but they were quickly overwhelmed in disaster.

Of the prominent men who formed what is known as the Young Ireland party the writer would not speak with disrespect. They differed from O'Connell on principle. His ways and means of redressing national wrongs are well known; they are fully explained in the two volumes at the head of this article. To be brief we quote his ideas and not his words. He took a very serious and religious view of life. Wars he looked on as an abomination. In armies are encamped on a vast scale all the vices and crimes that degrade men and send their souls to hell. Hence he could not endure an appeal to the sword as the remedy for Ireland's wrongs.

The Young Ireland party took a different view. They thought O'Connell's principles were a damper on the national spirit, and also that they were not sustained by the facts of history. In other words, on the question must national wrongs be remedied solely by moral persuasion, or is a recourse to arms or physical force never allowable, there were two clashing principles. In their applica tion to Ireland on this occasion both failed. Repeal was not carried by argument, and separation was not accomplished by the sword. But if O'Connell failed in this instance he succeeded on