Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 1.djvu/67

 the proper place, and I have agreed to write to the Primate on the subject. I fear he will be against the movement; but as a middle measure O'C. proposes a provincial dinner which would save us from troublesome intruders. We will do either thing if the Primate consent, and probably the dinner, all things considered, should be held rather than the meeting. Ever yours, 1em

Mr. O'Hagan did not obtain the approval of the Primate, and we were for a time dead-locked. With the rash confidence of a young man intoxicated with his own rhetoric, I insisted that we could and would succeed in Belfast; but when the thing was done and over I looked back on the adventure as a man who has walked close to a precipice in the dark, and sees with amazement and thankfulness how narrowly he has escaped a catastrophe.

The Tory Press probably surmised the state of affairs, and persistently defied the agitator to visit the capital of the loyal North, and in the end O'Connell grew angry and resolved at all hazards to accept the original invitation. It will help the reader to understand the condition of Ulster at that time to note what followed. The Ulster Orangemen were vehement supporters of the law, when the law was a convenient instrument of oppression, but they treated it with contempt whenever it crossed their purposes or prejudices. An eminent public man desired to meet his political friends in a town where they amounted to over fifty thousand, and it was determined to resist this design by open force. To Newry, a frontier town with a large Catholic population, it was admitted he might go, but he was warned that if he presumed to pass the Orange frontier it would be at his peril. Between Newry and Belfast Orange lodges were convoked, and the mildest measure proposed was to clutch his horses' heads, turn them back, and hunt him out of Ulster. After Newry was passed on the line of approach to Belfast, all the active magistrates were Orangemen. The first stage from Newry was Bannbridge, and the only innkeeper there, obeying the political pressure, announced that he would furnish no post-horses to the Agitator; the same resolution was adopted