Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 2.djvu/96

 regret.' Our cause was trampled under the feet of soldiers and spies; the country was in a panic; the arm of the law was strong and merciless; the malice of my enemies desperate and vindictive; but I had 'not exhibited the least regret for my course.' I accept it as my epitaph.

"The 'cause' was not 'abandoned,' on the contrary, it was regaining courage and confidence at that hour by the demonstration that English law might be resisted with success. You had made it ridiculous by threats unaccomplished; my forty days' combat, face to face with the law, was making the pulse of the people beat fast again. They felt that for one man to exhaust and defeat all the resources of a powerful State was a more exemplary victory (whatever its intrinsic value) than if Ballingarry had been made a Bannockburn.

"Sir Lucius O'Brien (admitted the guilt 'of the culprit! What then! The opinion of a man unknown to me—with whom I have never had the slightest communication then or since—an opinion contradicted by his companions as soon as it was uttered, the opinion of a man who repudiated his own brother, an opinion uttered behind my back, and over which I had no possible control—am I to be slandered on grounds like these? I cannot think that even in the Banbridge Petty Sessions this would have passed for evidence. It belongs to your later studies—the Jurisprudence of the Lamp-post.

"But I did not disown the memorial. No, indeed; I looked on with unmixed satisfaction while twenty thousand citizens of Dublin, including the foremost in every profession and pursuit, while some hundreds of the Irish priesthood—while men I have never heard of, and places I had never seen, proclaimed their sympathy with my life and character, and demanded my release. The reasons urged were their reasons, not mine. What I gloried in was the answer such a demonstration furnished to my slanderers—come what might, they had failed—you had failed, and the aim of my life would not be misunderstood.

"I did not forbid the movement; nor did Meagher and O'Brien forbid a similar memorial at the same moment against their sentence being carried out. They let it take its course. When will you spit your poisonous rheum upon them; or is it only in me it is a crime to have friends?