Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 1.djvu/294

 "In the Council there was deep anxiety and alarm. They felt that the Government could not afford to be defeated again, and defeated by a man who had so often predicted this disaster. The question was, how could it be averted? To inflame opinion till it grew red-hot against the base practice of jury-packing might alarm the class of jurors upon whom the Castle counted. A great open-air meeting of Confederates was summoned for this purpose, and the general body of citizens met in the Royal Exchange with a similar object. It was necessary to consider at the same time what was to be done in case of a conviction. A small minority of the Council thought preparations ought immediately to be made for a rescue. If the Government could carry off a man who had so completely identified himself with the revolution it would greatly dishearten the people. It was determined to ascertain the wishes of the clubs and their state of preparation.

"When we took stock of our resources, it appeared that Dublin city and county had thirty clubs, numbering from two hundred to five hundred members each; other cities were about as well provided; but though an agrarian revolution had been constantly insisted upon as the road to liberty, there was not one club in the agricultural districts. Lalor assumed, indeed, and Mitchel after him, that the trampled peasantry were as ready for insurrection as gunpowder for the match, but this proved to be a rash and fatal assumption.

"It was easy, at the same time, to count the muster-roll of our antagonists and note their elaborate precautions. There were ten thousand troops in the city, perfectly armed and equipped, and nearly forty-thousand in the country; all the strategic points were occupied and fortified. There was not a week's supply of food in Dublin, and all the food in the island, except what was growing in the soil, was in warehouses where the English army could reduce it to ashes in four-and- twenty hours. But the chief difficulty of a rescue was one created by Mitchel himself. He had scoffed at the necessity of systematic preparation, and there was no depot of arms or ammunition. He had declared a leader would come with the necessity, and there was no officer among the Confederates who could take charge of a company. Some of his partisans