Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 1.djvu/117

 to do was to maintain in public that he was still on the same track, and to conceal from the people, by painful and shameful devices, that he had altogether changed his purpose.

The threatened storm soon came, and came in a fashion wholly unforeseen. After my return from Darrynane Davis went to Belfast to meet Thomas O'Hagan, Sharman Crawford, and other leaders of the Federal party who were about to hold a conference in the northern capital. Davis wished well to their experiment, as we all did. It would bring men into the field likely to be listened to in England, and perhaps by the Irish gentry, and who were of undoubted integrity of character and purpose. O' Council made a vain attempt to draw them into the Repeal Association as Federalists only, but they would not listen to him. If they overcame their personal objections, which were rooted, they knew that the bulk of their followers could not be induced to enter Conciliation Hall on any pretence, and it was plain that the chief force of Federalism arose from the fact that it was an alternative to Repeal. It would have been a powerful auxiliary to the National movement if O'Connell had let it alone, but he had left prison with the determination to break definitely with the Mallow Defiance and the monster meetings, and retreat steadily to the status quo ante bellum whenever he had secured a decent pretence. As the Federalists would not come to him, he unhappily determined to go to them. In a long letter to the Repeal Association, dealing with a multitude of topics, this portentous sentence appeared:—

"For my own part, I will own that since I have come to contemplate the specific differences, such as they are, between simple Repeal and Federalism, I do at present feel a preference for the Federative plan, as tending more to the utility of Ireland and the maintenance of the connection with England than the proposal of simple Repeal. But I must either deliberately propose or deliberately adopt from some other person a plan of Federative Union before I bind myself to the opinion I now entertain."

Nor was this all. "The Federalists," he added, "cannot but perceive that there has been on my part a pause in the agitation for Repeal since our liberation from unjust captivity."