Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 1.djvu/69

 A placard was issued announcing that the meeting would not take place, and that those who purchased tickets might have their money returned at the Vindicator office. The Orangemen were naturally in a rage, and recreated themselves by an attack on my office, in which there was soon not a pane of glass unbroken.

I went immediately to the officer in command of the Constabulary, and reported what was happening. He was a grey-headed, saffron-coloured old satrap, who had probably never once in his life employed his authority to restrain Orange violence or protect Popish property. At any rate he gave me no assistance, and seemed amazed and insulted that I should expect it. This was the way the scales of justice were poised at Belfast fifty years ago.

The banquet and a levée where O'Connell received his friends were remarkably successful, even the Whigs who would not go to the banquet thought fit to send a deputation to welcome him to the North as an eminent reformer. The pavilion accommodated fifteen hundred persons, and was crowded with the flower of the Ulster Catholics and a few Liberal Protestants, notably Robert M'Dowall, a Belfast merchant, who occupied the chair. O'Connell's original purpose was certainly attained; he succeeded in moving the entire population of Ulster from the "Gap of the North" to the Lough of Belfast. But the Orangemen boasted that they would lay hold of him on his return journey, and swore that he would have to run the gauntlet from the Lagan to the Bann. But they were mistaken; he was due at a public dinner in the North of England in a few days, and the day after our banquet he sailed for Greenock in a Belfast steamer, and the Orangemen saw the last of him on board surrounded by his friends. The feeling of relief throughout Ireland was immense—nothing like it was known since he escaped the bullet of d'Esterre. No one probably felt the relief so keenly as I did when I realised too late how rash and perilous an experiment we had made. It had ended triumphantly, and I could now return to my ordinary business.

Whatever leisure I could command in so busy a career was employed in fitting myself for the battle of life. I took up anew the education so prematurely interrupted in my