Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 1.djvu/200

 but there was still the danger that he would authorise me to publish it in the Nation, and against this danger O'Connell took precaution so marvellous that for a time there was a suspicion that he had lost his intellect. In a speech extending to five columns, the Irish Liberator undertook to prove that the Nation had committed high treason, not some sentimental extravagance, sometimes so named, but the high treason for which men are hanged, drawn, and quartered. He recited and accepted principles of high prerogative authority incompatible with public liberty, and which would have rendered the Repeal movement impossible. Pennefather or Blackburne had never uttered sentiments more irreconcilable with Irish nationality; it was the renunciation and denial of all Robert Holmes had preached so successfully in the railway prosecution, and much of what he himself had said at the monster meetings. Out of this long arraignment I will only quote a single sentence, to illustrate its spirit. Chief Justice Holt, he said, described one specimen of treason: "If persons do assemble themselves and act with force in opposition to some law which they think inconvenient, and hope thereby to get it repealed, this is levying war and treason." This was hard to bear from the convener of the monster meetings, and the author of the Mallow Defiance, directed to the destruction of men one of whom had been tried along with him in the same spirit of prerogative law. From that moment opinion could be restrained no longer. It burst out in many directions. All the transactions I have glanced at were revived in the public memory, and in a few months O'Connell lost his unparalleled popularity, and the Repeal Association became a wilderness. It was seen now that the Nation had not taught in vain, for everywhere the men who had been reared on its doctrines of patriotism and integrity came to the rescue in an ever-increasing volume. The reaction commenced in Munster, where the Celtic race are predominant. The Cork Repealers refused to allow the Weekly Register to be substituted for the Nation in their reading-rooms, and traced with fatal plainness all the disorder to the surrender of Dungarvan to a Whig official. In the Limerick Corporation Dr. Griffin, brother of the eminent novelist, reviewed recent transactions, justifying