Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 1.djvu/277

 the measures which the occasion required. Feuds in the National Party ought to end at once. It was only through unanimity and the enthusiasm of a whole nation that we could hope to succeed, and they must be got at all price. It was not difficult, I hoped, for Ireland was electrified by the tidings that every post brought from the Continent of insurrection against misgovernment, and what was impossible yesterday seemed possible and apparently easy to-day. The whole of the Confederate leaders in town agreed to this policy.

Sir Colinan O'Loghlen and Dr. Gray undertook to obtain a conference of the Old Irelanders, and I agreed to move in the Confederation that Mitchel and any who retired with him should be invited to return, and Dillon suggested that he and I should have a conference with Mitchel on ways and means. The Confederate leaders were of opinion that the occasion was as propitious as we could ever hope it to be. Pius IX. at that time stood at the head of a movement for wise and moderate reforms throughout Europe, and the Catholic Church in Ireland and elsewhere might be counted on to move with him. The English Government were at the moment engaged in negotiations with Naples to obtain for Sicily the identical concessions Ireland was asking for herself, and it might be assumed that it only needed an impulse sufficiently peremptory to induce her to concede to Ireland what she urged Naples to concede to Sicily. In England