Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 1.djvu/123

 his sketches as mastered by Young Ireland, and Tait's Magazine, at that time the organ of Philosophical Radicalism, summed up the controversy in terms which were considered not unfair or ungenerous:—

"The Agitator has ceased to be master of the agitation. The magician is impotent to exorcise has only a qualified and conditional power to command the spirits that his spells have evoked. He cannot now do what he will with his own; there is a power in the Repeal Association, behind the chair, and greater than the chair. Why did Mr. O'Connell take the first opportunity he could find to snap his fingers at Federalism so soon after having deliberately and elaborately avowed a preference for it? Not merely because Federalists stood aloof and did not seem to feel flattered by his preference, but chiefly because Mr. Duffy wrote a certain letter in the Nation—a letter, we may say in passing, which more than confirms the sense we have long entertained of this gentleman's and his coadjutors' talent, sincerity, and mental independence—refusing in pretty flat terms to be marched to or through the Coventry of Federalism. Mr. O'Connell has since, not in the best taste or feeling, sneered at 'the young gentlemen who thought themselves fitter leaders than he was'; but the young gentlemen carried the day, nevertheless, against the old gentleman. We see in this that there is a limit to the supremacy of this extraordinary man over the movement which his own genius originated; what he has done he is quite unable to undo; Repeal has a life of its own, independent of his influence or control; his leadership is gladly accepted and submitted to, but always under condition that he leads the right way."

The Federal controversy might pass as a skirmish arising accidentally one of the domestic broils no political party can altogether escape; but incidents followed which justify the belief that the advance to Federation was the first move in a deliberate design to relinquish the National cause, substituting for it some sort of alliance with the Whigs, and planting in Conciliation Hall instead of the powerful Repeal Association an organisation so feeble and mean-spirited that the Young Liberator (as Mr. John O'Connell came to be called in good-humoured irony, largely leavened with con-