Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 1.djvu/128

 esteem. He had been recently blackballed by the—Young Irelanders, he believed—in the 'Eighty-two Club, and he came down to the Association burning for revenge. He fell on a chance phrase of Barry's in the debate, misrepresented it outrageously, and declared that it was characteristic of his party and his principles—a party on which the strong hand of O'Connell must be laid.

"'The Calvinist or Episcopalian of the North, the Unitarian, the Sectaries, every man who had any faith in Christianity was resolved that it should neither be robbed nor thieved by a faction half acquainted with the principles they put forward, and not at all comprehending the Irish character or the Irish heart. Were his audience prepared to yield up old discord or sympathies to the theories of Young Ireland? As a Catholic and as an Irishman, while he was ready to meet his Protestant friends upon an equal platform, he would resent any attempt at ascendancy, whether it came from honest Protestants or honest professing Catholics.'

"During the delivery of this false and intemperate harangue O'Connell cheered every offensive sentence, and finally took off his cap and waved it over his head triumphantly. He knew, as all the intelligent spectators knew, that a man destitute of character and veracity was libelling men as pure and disinterested as any who had ever served a public cause, and he took part with the scoundrel. It was one of the weaknesses of his public life to prefer agents who dared not resist his will; but this open preference of evil to good was the most unlucky stroke of his life. Twelve months later he died, having in the meantime lost his prodigious popularity and power; and of all the circumstances which produced that tragic result the most operative was probably his conduct during this day.

"Davis followed Mr. Conway. The feeling uppermost in his mind was probably suggested by the contrast between the life of the man and his new heroic opinions; and it will help to/put the reader in the same standpoint when I inform him that the pious Mr. Conway a few years later professed himself a convert to Protestantism, to obtain the wages of a proselytising society.

"The reader knows in some degree what Thomas Davis