admitted that he had spoken under a misapprehension. This peaceful ending of the affair did not commend itself to Saxton, who, with the intention of branding O'Connell as a coward, published in the public press on Saturday evening a partial statement of what had happened. Smarting under the imputation, O'Connell charged Peel and Saxton with resorting to a paper war. This, of course, led to a direct challenge from Peel. A meeting was arranged, but was frustrated by Mrs. O'Connell. It was then agreed to meet on the continent, and the parties were already on their way thither when O'Connell was arrested in London on the information of James Beckett, under-secretary of state, and bound over in heavy penalties to keep the peace. In 1825, after the second reading of the Catholic Relief Bill, O'Connell, thinking to do an act of justice to Peel, tendered a full apology to him, acknowledging himself to have originally been in the wrong. The apology was certainly more than Peel had any right to expect, and O'Connell was immediately charged with crouching to the most implacable and dangerous enemy of the catholic cause. To this charge O'Connell replied, ‘There was, I know it well, personal humiliation in taking such a step. But is not this a subject upon which I merit humiliation? Yes. Let me be sneered at and let me be censured even by the generous and respected; but I do not shrink from this humiliation. He who feels conscious of having outraged the law of God ought to feel a pleasure in the avowal of his deep and lasting regret’ (Dublin Evening Post, 3 Nov. 1825).
Meanwhile, the bitterness which marked the ‘securities’ controversy in its first phase was giving way to a feeling of apathy and despair. Aggregate meetings grew rarer. A Catholic Association—the suppressed board under a new name—met seldom and effected nothing. It ran into debt, and, having been extricated by O'Connell, moved into smaller rooms in Crow Street. In parliament the proposal to emancipate the catholics on any terms was rejected by overwhelming majorities. O'Connell, who was watching with interest the progress of the democratic movement in England, was seriously revolving in his own mind whether more was not to be obtained by supporting the movement for a reform of parliament than by presenting petitions to a parliament which showed itself so obstinately opposed to the catholic claims. The general tranquillity of the country, however, under the neutral government of Peel's successor, Sir Charles Grant [see Grant, Charles, Lord Glenelg], coupled with the representations of friends in parliament and the tacit conversion of Grattan on the securities question, induced him to advise one more effort on the old lines. He spoke sanguinely of success. ‘One grand effort now,’ he wrote to the O'Conor Don on 21 Oct. 1819, ‘ought to emancipate us, confined, as it should be, exclusively to our own question. After that I would, I acknowledge, join the reformers hand as well as heart, unless they do now emancipate. By they, of course, I mean the parliament’ (Fitzpatrick, Corresp. i. 61). The death of Grattan intervened, and it was suggested that the petition should be entrusted to Plunket. To this O'Connell objected, on the ground that Plunket had declared that conditions and securities were just and necessary. Accordingly, in
