Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 1.djvu/335

 discipline to handle an army. What had happened in Munster was no more than had happened in other countries. Nations have fits of paralysis, and even of baseness. When Charles Edward was at Derby his English partisans, who constituted the bulk of the gentry and clergy in half the counties of England, did not move a hand in his behalf, and it was just now confidently asserted that over thirty millions of Frenchmen would permit the Republic they had created to be strangled before their eyes. Lalor was a thoroughly honest and remarkably able man, but our paths distinctly separated. I told him he must fail and probably fail ignominiously, and that Ireland had failures enough. He took his own course, and many have since followed him in it, but unhappily without falsifying my predictions.

Before my last trial I was removed from Newgate to Richmond Penitentiary, where O'Brien, Meagher, and their associates were still confined, but I was not allowed to see or communicate with them. A happy accident gave me, however, an opportunity of spending a day with them. William Fagan, member for Cork city, wrote to one of my friends that an amnesty extending to all the political prisoners would be granted if I "offered securities for the future." I would offer no securities, and I was well assured that my friends would not purchase their safety at such a price, but it was proper that they should speak for themselves, and I showed Mr. Fagan's letter to the Governor of the prison, and asked that I might be allowed to visit O'Brien and the others. He consented, and we spent a pleasant day together disposing of the business in a contemptuous sentence. This was Mr. Fagan's letter:—

"Private and Confidential.

",—I have just returned from an interview of over an hour's duration with Lord Clarendon.

"My firm conviction is that if Mr. Duffy made any concession so as to give the Government a fair excuse to escape from the whole affair that an amnesty extending to all would be the result. Lord Clarendon did not say this in so many words; but he over and over repeated to me that the Government was not in a position to make any distinction between