Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 1.djvu/259

 avoid the necessity of furnishing a scheme of repealing the Union altogether, it might be best of all. Such a document at best would be little other than a mark for criticism to the sneering enemy."

At the same time I wrote to O'Brien:—

"Your Report would make a useful lecture, but my notion of the document required is one which would be as exact and comprehensive as one of Napoleon's plans of a campaign, sent to a particular general to light it out. And even if we did not publish it I hold it to be essential to have such a document drawn up, after mature consideration and discussion. &hellip; Men never get even their own ideas clearly before them till they have written them out. What is best to do, perhaps, is to discuss our policy thoroughly when you come to town, and then to draw up the document for our future guidance. &hellip; Lalor proposes one plan. We must answer that, not by a series of plans, but, if possible, by one other and more practical measure. If there be no such answer we are ploughing the sea; but assuredly there is."

In the end the Council committed the task of preparing the Report to me, and, when it was produced some weeks later, I must speak of it somewhat in detail, as that document not only signally influenced the course of the Confederation, but influenced in a notable manner the public policy of Ireland from that period to this.

Lalor grew impatient of the hesitation which the Confederates who agreed with him continued to exhibit, and he summoned a public meeting of farmers to consider their position. Unfortunately he altogether wanted the physical gifts which control a multitude, and he was encountered by William Connor, then known as the Farmers' Friend, who scorned his abstract theories and insisted that all that was wanted was valuation of rents and perpetuity of tenure. The farmers leaned to what they regarded as the more practical proposal, and Lalor received the first of many painful lessons how little his southern peasants realised the vision he had conceived of savage wolf-dogs ready to be unmuzzled.

But in the meantime his opinions were gathering force among men of ardent disposition. Mitchel wrote to him that he fully adopted his principles except in the method and