against the national cause in silence, and he adopted a device which in the end proved successful. Immediately after Dungarvan was lost he submitted two reports to the General Committee; one offering some feeble and utterly untrue defence of that transaction, on which it is not necessary to comment; the other, known as the Peace Resolutions, denned the policy of the Association anew. This was his marvellous contention, that it was necessary for the safety of the Association—which, it seems, was in danger of being prosecuted by a Whig Minister, who kept his place only by the help of Repeal votes, and who could not get his officials re-elected except by shameful connivance with the Repeal Association—to declare its peace policy anew, and in more definite terms. One of its purposes, O'Connell avowed, was to draw a line between Old and Young Ireland.- In fact he could not carry out his now manifest compact with the Whigs without silencing the Young Irelanders. He assumed that this end could best be accomplished by tendering them propositions which they could not affirm without self-contempt and public reproach. Had he required them to deny the law of gravitation, or the motion of the earth, it is certain they would refuse, and he required their immediate acceptance of propositions as false and absurd. The Association was asked to affirm that moral force furnished a sufficient remedy for public wrong in all times and in all countries, and that physical force must be abhorred. Any one, Mr. John O'Connell declared, who refused to accept this doctrine must cease to be a member of the Association. Referring to the Young Irelanders he said, if they did not submit, unconditionally and unequivocally, to the principles of peaceful agitation and to the utter repudiating of physical force under any circumstance, it was the instant necessity of the case that they should cease to be members. The object in view could not be misunderstood by any man of sense. The Bishop of Killaloe wrote privately to O'Brien:—
"Whigs are to be supported, and that support given to them in violation of the most solemn engagements, and to the disappointment of the most disinterested advocates of the National cause."
