Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 1.djvu/188

 man he had joined the Spanish Revolutionists under Mina, and if he still believed in anything it was in the sword, but it was the misfortune of the dilapidated old man to be the paid servant of an Association which had declared its abhorrence of the ordinary doctrines of public liberty, and it was his duty to sound an alarm. He solemnly warned the meeting that after this admission of high treason committed in '43 no business could be transacted till it was clearly ascertained that O'Connell's policy was universally admitted. The business then waited O'Connell's direction.

A new iniquity was alleged against the Young Irelanders in this hysterical era. The Pilot, which after long hibernation was beginning to be heard of again, was the authority for this offence. Mr. Barrett had discovered that a series of books were being published by these gentlemen who boasted they were teaching the people a nobler policy and a higher morality, which stabbed O'Connell, and through him the country, and these publications were known to be under the. management of a man associated with the Nation party, who at the time of the State Trials had been in communication with the Crown lawyers, and was, in short, a hired spy. Here was a grave indictment. I answered it in a letter to the Pilot, which that respectable journal considered itself justified in repressing, but the letter was of course published in the Nation. The facts were simple to nudity. The books in question were identified by some extracts from them published in the Pilot article, and I was able to declare that the books were not only not connected with the Nation or with the Young Irelanders, but that the series was established to rival and undersell the Library of Ireland. The books were never reviewed in the Nation, but among the notices which they had obtained and published the most conspicuous was a laudation from the Pilot. The editor of the series, who was charged with being a Government spy in 1843 (and who probably was so), had never at any period written a line in the Nation, but at the time he was alleged to be a Government spy, and at the time then present, he was a writer in the Pilot. The man in question was named Mark O'Callaghan, and unfortunately was brother to an honest, respectable man, John Cornelius O'Callaghan. He finally took office openly