Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 2.djvu/110

 was unjust to Crawford. In the height of his indignation Lucas used language respecting him which it was hopeless that a cold, proud man would ever forgive.

During the recess the leaders of the League were entertained at public banquets by their constituents, for while the Support they received diminished in area it increased in intensity. They seized these occasions to enforce the moral which the situation of the country preached: all the disasters which had befallen the people were no one's fault but their own.

"Of the five-and-twenty deserters who have gone over to the enemy" (said one Leaguer) "there are three-and- twenty of whom I could have told with as much certainty twelve months ago as at this hour that they would betray the country on the first opportunity. If constituencies will elect men notoriously corrupt or notoriously allied with the Whigs, it is too absurd to pretend that an experiment has failed because they have done what any man might have foretold they would do. If you were going to fight, and selected poltroons for officers, of course you would lose the battle. If you were going to try a suit at law, and selected blockheads for counsel, of course you would lose the case. But does that prove that with brave men and wise men you would fail? Look at the candidates recommended or assisted by the Tenant League; not one single man of them has proved untrue."

Against all these reverses fortune supplied one signal set-off. In Mr. Sadleir's contest for Carlow, Mr. Dowling, an elector who refused to support him, and threatened to canvass his tenants against him, was arrested by one of Sadleir's election agents on his way to the hustings, and carried to the local office of the Tipperary Bank. There were bills of his in the bank which had not come to maturity, and he had given to a friend who endorsed them a bond as a counter security. On this unripe bond he was arrested. As no attorney could sign the certificate in such a transaction without risk of being struck off the roll, the name of a dying attorney was forged to the instrument. In these proceedings it was proved that Mr. Sadleir had intervened, not merely through agents, but personally by direction and control. When he came