Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 1.djvu/195

 newspaper, denounced to immediate ruin, outlived every man conspicuously engaged in the warfare against it. Had the charges been true the newspaper would properly have perished, and the men associated with it would be only remembered with contempt; but they were not true, and the names of these men are more honoured in Ireland to-day than any of their opponents but the greatest. The only certain result of this tempest of injustice was the undesirable and almost calamitous one that the opinion of a prelate on a political question in Ireland had no longer either the force or the character that once belonged to it.

O'Connell resolved to improve his victory. The Young Irelanders, he declared, were false to Repeal, and were answerable for having kept away from the cause the Northern Protestants, who were alarmed by their opinions, and would doubtless otherwise have joined. This proved an unhappy stroke, for it brought forth two conspicuous Northern gentlemen who had joined the Association to contradict the statement. Mr. Grey Porter declared that what withheld the Northerns from the Association was primarily the unaudited funds. Protestants would never join an Association with a despotic and irresponsible treasurer. For himself he was opposed to physical force now, as he had been opposed to it in 1843, when Mr. O'Connell was holding his physical force meetings. The second Northern, Mr. John Martin, wrote to the committee declaring his adhesion to the peace principles on which the Association was founded, but his decided objection to the dictatorial conduct by which Mr. John O'Connell had brought about the secession, and to the withdrawal of the Nation from reading-rooms entitled to receive it under a distinct regulation, and in return for money paid; a proceeding justified on the ungenerous pretence that the journal had committed a crime of which a Tory Government found it impossible to convict it. Mr. Ray was instructed to send Mr. Martin the marvellous reply, "That inasmuch as he dissented from the rules of the Association he ceased to be a member of that body." Mr. Martin, who was a man of feeble physique and uncertain health, had a boundless supply of northern pluck, and determined to attend the Association, and assert his right as a member. He was as much a member,