Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 1.djvu/187

 And then, or since, or before, there was never a line tending to excite the people to outrage, or insubordination not one line."

I described the gloomy change in the national prospects which followed Clontarf; a change deepened by sectarian controversies in the Association, and by insults to France and America.

"From that hour the tone of the Nation on the means of liberation altered. We promised speedy and sweeping success no more. There was now but one mode left—a slow, deliberate one—and we turned with all our energy to create a new moral force in the country. Education and Conciliation were their means. The Repeal Reading-rooms, the Library of Ireland, many reports of the Association, many volumes of national literature, were our agencies.

u Under these circumstances it was idle to talk of peace resolutions, for nobody meant anything but peace. Resolutions against Repealers taking place and ceasing to be Repealers, against the return of any but Repeal candidates, under any circumstances, these would have been pertinent to our condition. It is the side from which danger is threatened that men ought to guard; not the side where danger is impossible.

"As we must rely on moral force, the greater, I insisted, was the need that our policy should have an intelligible and practical method, and that it should not wantonly undo one year what it had strenuously striven to accomplish the year before:—

"To war, marshalled armies, stored arsenals, mapped campaigns, are not more necessary than a large, distinct, and liberal policy to moral progress. Without that beacon men run hither and thither doing and undoing; throwing down to-day what was built up with care and pains only yesterday, outraging friends won by labour and sacrifices, belying principles which lie at the foundation of our hopes; laying waste the labour of years by some escapade of ignorance, intolerance, or vanity."

This was a sober and perfectly accurate report of the transactions in question, but it outraged the sensitive conscience of the Head Pacificator. When he was a young