Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 1.djvu/179

 knowledge that be had fallen under the influence of his feeble and malicious son, but let him not forget also that a group of young men who had given their lives to the public cause, and older men like O'Brien and Grattan, were struggling, not for any personal end, but against what they believed to be, and what indeed was, the ruin of their country. For the emancipator, the guide and father of his people, was about in his old age to make a wreck not only of us but of himself, of the cause to which he was pledged, and of the people who loved him so tenderly. At the next meeting there was an immense crowd, and a vivid interest in the expected speech of O'Connell. The Whigs, he declared, had an opportunity of doing great service to Ireland; there were eleven measures which he wanted them to pass in the current session of Parliament. As we had already reached the 6th of July, to expect eleven important measures to be passed in the month that Parliament would still sit was being exigeant with his friends. But we now know what the most suspicious scarcely foresaw, that the session would pass, and the Parliament would pass, and the lives of O'Connell and Lord John Russell would pass without one of these measures becoming law, without indeed one of them being so much as proposed to Parliament.