Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 1.djvu/252

 multitude of Protestant artisans, and Orangemen in considerable numbers, attended, and the young orators were courteously and even generously received in a place where five years before the appearance of O'Connell had threatened civil war. It was a hopeful sign for the future, but the need could not wait for any future. The people could be saved if we got control of our own resources, and we were in a state of national disaster when ends that seemed remote or impossible were sometimes accomplished in a day by a divine frenzy of impatience. We had pledged our lives to the deliverance of Ireland, but the conditions of the problem were constantly changing, and it had become necessary to inquire anew how the thing was to be done. The people could be saved if Ireland had the control of her own interests, and if we could not obtain that control the outlook was tragic. I mooted to some of my colleagues the necessity of carefully considering the plans that were floating in our minds and reducing them to writing that we might test their feasibility.

The desire for such a skeleton map of our route was stimulated by an altogether unexpected event. I received a letter of singular originality and vigour from a correspondent personally unknown to me broaching such a plan, which wanted nothing but feasibility to be acceptable. The writer was James Fintan Lalor, son of Patrick Lalor, of Tinnakill, well known at that time as the author, or at any rate the chief promotor, of the Anti-Tithe movement, which had spread over the entire island a few years earlier. James Lalor was entirely unknown in politics, but he announced himself with a voice of assured confidence and authority. The Repeal movement conducted by O'Connell, he declared, was base and dishonest to the core, and if the Confederation was to be only an honest and respectable copy of the Association it would never accomplish its purpose. There was neither strength nor even a disposition in the country to carry Repeal, but it might be carried even in its most perfect form of national independence if it were associated with another question.

"A mightier question," he added, "is in the land one beside which Repeal dwarfs down into a petty parish question; one on which Ireland may not alone try her own right but try the right of the world; on which you would be not merely an