Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 2.djvu/87

 York, Dr. M' Knight at Belfast was making it a ground of distrust against the League Council that some of us had once been associates of a man who had joined the base band of slave-owners in America and had done his best to destroy the freest constitution in the universe.

From politics Mr. Mitchel proceeded to personal abuse, and in his "Jail Journal" published imputations upon me as shamefully and demonstrably false as those of Mr. Barrett or Mr. Birch. Among the associates of my life, from my boyhood in a provincial town down to that hour, I had never lost a friend; why John Mitchel became an exception is a fit subject for inquiry in this narrative. Our intimacy began in a way that promised a different result. I found him in mature manhood the local attorney of an Ulster village, and, recognising promise of public usefulness in him, I invited him to write a volume for the Library of Ireland, and finally I brought him to Dublin as a contributor to the Nation, with an income which placed him at ease, and a position which opened for him for the first time a public career. In what spirit I acted while we were associated he has himself described: "I do not blame you," he wrote, in the note announcing his retirement from the Nation—"I do not blame you in the slightest particular; and, moreover, I am quite certain I could not have worked in subordination to any other man alive near so long as I have done with you. And, lastly, I give you credit in all that is past for acting on good and disinterested motives, with the utmost sincerity, and also with uniform kindness to me personally."

After a couple of years' frank and cordial co-operation Mitchel left the Nation, and left under circumstances in which I am persuaded no honourable man will hold me to blame, circumstances which, reviewing them on the brink of the grave, I still regard as I did in that day. The reader of this narrative has already heard them. It is only necessary to say here that he desired to alter the policy of the party we represented from Nationality to Jacobinism, to transfer our contest for Irish rights from the control of men who guided their conduct by principles of enlightened equity to tenant-farmers and farm-labourers, demoralised and pauperised by famine; and at the same time attempted to employ the