Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 1.djvu/276

 earlier; the flag of the new Government was the same that a French fleet had unfurled in Bantry Bay, the same under which a French general had scattered the British forces at Castlebar, the same under which an Irish brigade had fought on so many fields for the last half century, and it was naturally dear to Irishmen. We saw France indeed under a strange glamour in that day; a French ouvrier seemed to us a palladin in a blouse, a French soldier a missionary of liberty, and a Republican statesman the friend of universal deliverance for the oppressed. Before the news reached Dublin, one of the ordinary meetings of the Confederation had been summoned, and at that meeting it was altogether impossible to postpone welcoming the good tidings. My principal colleagues were absent at an election where Meagher contested his native city, and I had the undivided responsibility. The chair was to be occupied by a recent recruit, Lord Wallscourt, a man engrossed in social questions, and who saw in the great event only a better chance for the organisation of labour. What ought the Confederates to do? It seemed to me that we had no honourable choice. In the recent controversy we had declared that we would joyfully embrace any chance of fighting for Ireland in which not a class but the country could unite, and here the occasion had come, or it would never come in our life-time. I spoke in this sense, declaring that we had long anticipated the happy chance when Ireland would be delivered from her bondage, and to my thinking the time was now near at hand. In the Nation, where I was entitled and bound to speak without reserve, and where I committed nobody but myself, I said in the ensuing number:—

"Ireland's opportunity—thank God, and France—has come at last! Its challenge rings in our ears like a call to battle, and warms our blood like wine. It demands of us what mission we have to entrust to its ministry, so often and so fervently evoked. We must answer if we would not be slaves for ever. We must unite, we must act, we must leap all barriers but those which are divine; if needs be, we must die, rather than let 'this providential hour pass over us unliberated."

When my friends returned to town I urged on them