Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 1.djvu/101

 to be employed to put down the Irish people consisted of fifty-one thousand Englishmen and forty-one thousand Irishmen, and might prove an unsuitable instrument for such a service. O'Connell might have said on this cardinal occasion, and was expected to say, that he was pursuing a peaceful end by peaceful means, which force could not touch; but he chose to meet menace by defiance, and by doing so he placed the contest once for all on the basis of force. There was ample justification in the state of Ireland for such a policy if he were determined to pursue it to the end, and to make the preparation which such a resolution required. If he were not so determined he was entering on a path which must lead in the end to humiliation and defeat. O'Connell's declaration was echoed throughout the island, and men for the first time were driven to estimate the price at which political liberty might have to be bought, and to consider whether or not they were ready to pay the price.

The English Press sustained Peel with a unanimity that recalled the national support which George III. obtained in trampling on the liberty of the American colonies. But there was one exception seriously embarrassing to Ministers. The Times warned Peel he was pursuing a false route. "A people"—this was the emphatic language of warning employed—"a people labouring under unexampled distress send in their £600 a week to a Repeal Fund, contributed generally in the inverse ratio of their means. The rabble of Repealers is joined by respectable and well-intentioned persons, and an insignificant faction has become a powerful party. In all this there is neither Whiggery nor Radicalism, nor pursuit of Roman Catholic as opposed to Protestant interests: it aims at being, and almost threatens to become, a national movement. The people of the United Kingdom" the powerful journal added—"were firmly persuaded that it was better to conciliate by repealing bad laws than to pour troops into Ireland for the purpose of enforcing them, when they could no longer be executed except at the bayonet point." The Leeds Mercury, a principal organ of the Dissenters, echoed this counsel. The Northern Star, on the part of the working men, whom it represented at that time as authentically as the Times represented the middle class, declared that they would not resist Repeal,