Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 1.djvu/269

 our policy to win an independent Parliament for Ireland. If there were any shorter road open to a people so divided and broken as ours, I did not know it. For to create not merely a vague desire, but a confident trust, in our ways and means was a necessary preliminary to success. We must choose our path once for all, and if it was not the right path, remember that every step was a step astray.

The Council occupied themselves with this report for several days, the opposition to it being represented by Mitchel and Reilly. It is enough now to say that every man of note on the Council accepted the report as adequately representing their opinions. Mitchel proposed as a substitute for it what was in effect Lalor's scheme of moral insurrection, though he did not give it Lalor's name. Half a century has since elapsed, during which Ireland has been deeply distressed and discontented, but no province, county, parish, townland, or single farmhouse has tried the plan on which Lalor and Mitchel relied. On the other hand, whatever has been gained for the people, the first recognition of Tenant Right by the House of Commons won by the Tenant League of 1852, and the Fixed Rent and Fixed Tenure won twenty years later by the party organised by Mr. Parnell, were won on the fundamental principles of that report. Into the first Parliamentary Party of independent opposition I carried these principles, and the second party, as its leader frankly declared, borrowed them from the leaders of 1852.