Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 1.djvu/100

 Government should declare their intention to arrest this dangerous movement. Their old suspicions against Peel the Emancipator revived, and nothing would content them but a plain and emphatic menace to the Repealers. Peel answered their expectations. He assured Parliament that there was no power with which the Constitution armed the Executive which would not be employed to resist Repeal, even at the painful cost of Civil War. To the inquiry, whether he held with one of his predecessors, that if all classes in Ireland united in the demand for Repeal it must be conceded, he replied brusquely, he did not.

The determination to put down opinion by force, and to resist the repeal of an Act of Parliament by Civil War, was so indefensible that it was promptly repudiated by the Whig Opposition, and has never been repeated by any English Minister under similar circumstances. Irish gentlemen, even among his warmest supporters, felt insulted by the declaration, that their opinion would count for nothing in deciding an international question to which they were a party. O'Connell answered Peel with contemptuous defiance: "I belong," he said, "to a nation of eight millions, and there is besides a million of Irishmen in England. If Sir Robert Peel has the audacity to cause a contest to take place between the two countries we will put him in the wrong, for we will begin no rebellion, but I tell him from this place that he dare not begin that strife against Ireland."

Samuel Ferguson afterwards wrote in the Dublin University Magazine: "If the Conservative gentry of Ireland thought fit to invite their friends and tenants to meet them at a new Dungannon there is no power in Britain which could prevent the severance of the two islands. And there can be no more fatal delusion than to suppose that Irish gentlemen, because they do not profess the Roman Catholic religion, are insensible to contemptuous language against their country, or that they are disposed to rest satisfied under any social inferiority whatever to the rest of the United Kingdom."

A letter from John Cornelius O'Callaghan, one of the staff of the Nation, was ordered on the motion of Mr. John O'Connell to be inserted on the minutes of the Association, recording the fundamental fact that the army which was