Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 2.djvu/97

 "Your last charge is, that I sent O'Brien to Ballingarry, and that the insurrection was (in consequence, no doubt) a contemptible failure. That I sent O'Brien to Ballingarry is utterly untrue; but I decline to debate a question of which you know nothing. The failure I am in no way bound to defend; I was not there; the time, place, or modus operandi were not of my choosing; but it passes human patience to hear you disparage it.

"'The Ballingarry failure' (you say, and one might fancy it was Mr. Birch who was sneering at O'Brien and his associates instead of Mr. Mitchel) 'is hardly, I suppose, to be treated as a criterion. A gentleman—a very estimable and worthy gentleman, certainly—goes with three or four attendants (!) (who are wholly unknown to the people they go amongst) into the counties of Kilkenny and Tipperary, and there tells several persons they are to rise in insurrection under his guidance, and free the country. He has no money, this gentleman, to pay troops, no clothing or arms to give them, no food to keep them alive. He just exhibits a pike, and bids them follow him and free the country!'

"Whatever was the value of that plan of campaign there is one thing a man may safely aver—it was at least better than yours; an opinion which may be predicated of any plan since the Tooley Street plot. One looks back on the United Irishman—at its promises, its performances, its plan of operations, its adjustment of means to ends (that grand secret of all human success) with feelings which even the interests at stake cannot keep grave. One must smile or swear. Your theory of revolution was reducible to two maxims worthy of Bedlam—that whatever was meditated against the English Government should be proclaimed beforehand, and that officers or preparation were superfluous. You neglected every precaution; the greatest as well as the smallest. You had no agent in France, no agent in America, no agent in Canada, no agent among the discontented Chartists of England. When you were arrested you had not a barrel of gunpowder, or a case of muskets. You did not know where to lay your hand upon pickaxes or crowbars to make the first barricade. Your resources literally began and ended in an ink-bottle. Your system of tactics consisted in uttering threats which you