have produced no practical or permanent results. The recruits won since 1843 would have silently retired, and the residue would have accepted Mr. John O'Connell as master. But he was not content. The Nation must be ruined and all sympathisers with it weeded out of the Association. This operation would clear the path for the Young Liberator's succession to the Tribunate. When O'Connell returned from London he adopted and applauded all his son had accomplished, and made it the starting point of future operations. He referred to the committee the question how all connection between the Nation and the Repeal Association could be effectually terminated, and the remnant of the committee promptly concurred in his design. Partisans at a distance were stimulated to sanction these proceedings, and men who for three years had been preaching independence, mutual tolerance, and integrity as the basis on which a nation must be built, had week after week signal evidence how much remained still to be done to create a public opinion which would be just and firm. The Bishop of Ardagh wrote to say that in his diocese there were no physical-force men, nor, he thanked God, any schoolboy philosophers, false and sanguinary Repealers, or Voltairian newspapers; the Nation was the most dangerous publication that ever appeared in Ireland. But in Ardagh they had applied a prompt remedy to so serious a peril. They had ignominiously expelled it from almost all of their literary institutions. This episcopal counsel became the text for many ecclesiastics of various degrees. The parish priest of Clones, who had been a Professor in Maynooth, and was, it may be surmised, a practical man, applied himself to the business with a will.
"I think it right to inform you," he wrote, "that a considerable time since I ejected the Nation from this parish. Individuals have since privately employed a person in this town to supply them with it; I ordered that person last week to write back to the Nation office to stop it."
The results of these energetic proceedings were not visible at once, but in time they became very conspicuous. Half a century passed, and these schoolboy philosophers and false and sanguinary Repealers after spotless lives have died without exception in the faith in which they were bred, and the
