Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 1.djvu/186

 myself and my friends I thanked him cordially, and assured him of our complete satisfaction and content with the course he had taken.

The minority bore their defeat with a self-control rare in political history. In the Nation following the debate not a syllable was uttered against O'Connell. We feared that if the faith of the people in their worshipped leader was shaken they would cease to believe in anything. And it helped us to be patient to remember that a man between seventy and eighty could not long control public affairs. But after my established habit, whenever the character of the journal was in danger of being misunderstood, I wrote, under my own name, a deliberate review of the state of affairs, justifying the proceedings of my friends. As this article became the occasion of the most memorable transaction of that era—the secession of O'Brien and the Young Irelanders from the Repeal Association—I must pause on it for a moment. I meant it to be a sober and entirely truthful account of our position and policy and the stringent necessity under which we acted.

There was no need, I insisted, for peace resolutions, because there was not at that time the slightest design of employing physical force a policy from which the current of events had carried us far away. But to make this admission the more significant, I compared it with the hopes and aims which existed before the Clontarf meeting.

"To the eyes of the Irish millions who knelt by the Croppies' grave with brothers' love, and sang the fierce songs of the era by their hearths, and on the hill-sides, and at their wakes and fairs and merry meetings, there was clearly discernible in the monster meetings an intense under-purpose, which filled their souls with passionate expectation. What it meant to the majority of them needed no oracle."

I admitted that this sentiment had been shared and fostered by the writers of the Nation:—

"I fully confessed that much was written calculated to stimulate the hope and desire of great and speedy changes wrought by a people's might; but not one whit beyond what was spoken by the orators of the movement at Mullaghmast dinners, and in Lismore declarations, and Mallow Defiances.