Ireland which was approved of by George Stephenson and the greatest railway authorities in the empire, and by the directors of the leading railway companies in Ireland. It was proposed to make loans out of the funds wasted on useless and ridiculous roads to Irish railway companies, who would undertake to employ the labouring classes at just wages, erect substantial huts for them near their work, and carry out a wisely designed scheme of railway extension. There was no risk, for the Irish railways were actually more prosperous than the English ones, and the money now squandered would be turned to national profit. He wished it to be distinctly understood that the motion was to have no political consequences. The plan was so just and satisfactory, that Mr. John O'Connell could not take the responsibility of opposing it, but the ruck of Repeal members, with Mr. Dillon Browne at their head, supported Lord John Russell, who obtained the rejection of the plan. When his constituents at the General Election assailed Mr. Browne for this treachery to Irish interests, he declared that O'Connell had secretly counselled the course he took, but it is possible and desirable to disbelieve the statement.
O'Connell attended Parliament, his spirit deeply tormented, I make no doubt, by the calamities of the people whom he had led so long, and humiliated by the failure of his alliance with the Whigs. But it was so hard to retreat. He had accepted favours for his family and friends from the Government, and he had repeatedly pledged himself for their good intentions; but the feeble, frigid Minister upon whom he had conferred power thought only of securing votes, and sacrificed the lives of the starving people to the interests of his commercial constituents in England. O'Connell spoke once in Parliament, and the assembly where he had dominated of old beheld a feeble old man muttering, in a voice which was scarcely audible to the reporters, on the perils of the famine—a subject on which the trump of an archangel could scarcely peal an adequate alarm. His medical advisers insisted that he should take rest in a better climate, and he set out on a journey for Rome. It was insisted at Conciliation Hall that he would soon return in restored health and vigour, and the Young Irelanders knew nothing to the contrary.
