Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 1.djvu/256

 the Confederates to fall back on this measure. 'By one move alone you can meet and match—and by that same move you will checkmate England.'"

Doheny, who lived in a neighbouring county, visited Lalor, and found the dogmatic, domineering tribune a deformed man, lame, deaf, near-sighted; and when his emotion was vivid almost inaudible from passion. "I could not be persuaded," he wrote to me, "that I had before me, in the poor, distorted, ill-favoured, hunchbacked creature, the bold propounder of the singular doctrines in the Nation letters." But his intellectual thews and sinews were in excellent condition, and it was by them he must be judged.

The letters made a profound impression on the Confederates generally, and especially on Father Kenyon and Mitchel. Mitchel was much perplexed; the theory of moral insurrection looked feasible and was abstractly just in a country where the people were perishing of hunger among food which they had created, but it flatly contradicted the doctrines he had been preaching since he came into public life. He had outrun and amazed his comrades by the declaration that he would feel it his public duty to arrest and hand over to justice any one whom he discovered mooting the question of physical force in the popular organisation. And later he had discriminated his opinion from Meagher's, who would not repudiate a resort to arms in all contingencies, by declaring that for his part he did not intend to employ force for the deliverance of Ireland in the present, the future, or the paulo-post future. He had much confidence in O'Brien's power to draw a section of the gentry into our ranks, and he declared that to introduce Lalor's doctrine into the Confederation would be as manifest a violation of good faith as were John O'Connell's sectarian harangues in Conciliation Hall. He wrote to O'Brien in this sense, admitting that he was attracted by these new opinions, but determined to resist their introduction into the Confederation:—

"I received your letter," he wrote to O'Brien, "re-enclosing those of Mr. Kenyon, Lalor, and Trenwith. And I need hardly repeat what I mentioned to you before, that my views of those gentlemen's doctrines entirely agree with yours, so far as the practical interference of the Confederation is