But at last the reaction began. The venerable prelate whose friendship with me commenced at the Newry soiree to Father Mathew, of which I have spoken, and continued throughout the intervening years, wrote to the Association that these idle differences should terminate, and the seceders be recalled. This was a heavy blow against the new policy: the 'differences described by a bishop as idle, and the return of the seceders represented as an object to be desired; but O'Connell knew how to evade it. He suppressed the bishop's letter, and wrote privately to him assuring him that all members of the Association would be liable to a prosecution for high treason if the seceders were permitted to return. He would go down on his knees to induce his lordship to withdraw a letter calculated to promote new trouble. The bishop did not insist on his letter being read,
it, to lend it, to borrow it. The Repeal Reading-room into which it was admitted had long forfeited its connection with the parent society. The man who sold it in the way of business was denounced as a bad citizen. The man who bought it was a fool. But time, as the poet teaches, "shows who will and can." The Nation had wound itself into the fibres of the Irish heart. The poor peasants clubbed their pence that they might hear on their only day of rest what they could do for the cause; the young tradesmen, to whom it had become almost as necessary as their daily bread, clung to it. The Conservative students enjoyed it as a stolen pleasure, trembling to be caught in an act of patriotism; the Irish exiles in England or France, or felling forests in Canada, or digging railways in the Western Republic, who still longed, like their predecessors two generations earlier, to hear " how was Old Ireland, and how did she stand," the poor Irish soldier who stole into a secret place with his treasure, the young priest who judged it with his own brain and conscience, not by word of command, cherished it the more for the dangers that it ran. "We never," a young farmer wrote at this time, "knew how we loved the Nation till now." This enthusiasm, the slanderers declared, was merely the paroxysm of a temporary fever; but it did not so prove. More than a generation has passed since those events, and to-day only an exceptional man can point out where Conciliation Hall stood; its hired claque have disappeared as completely as Major Sirr's "battalion of testimony"; insanity, suicide, the profligate renunciation of opinions for place, the fog of obscurity, have swallowed them up; its special press died in a stench; but the work done by the young men of the Nation is to be found in every Irish library in the five divisions of the world; the soldier on his march, the missionary in China and India, the digger in California, the solitary shepherd in the Australian Bush, have found refreshment in it. These men, too, have been heard of in the world, not to their discredit. And if the capital of the island which he did so much to free from the chains of sectarian ascendancy possesses a great monument to the memory of O'Connell, it was these "enemies of the Liberator" at home and abroad, more than any men, commenced and crowned with success this national undertaking.—"Four Years of Irish History."
