I believed it had not the slightest chance of success. His angry peasants straining to break their chains were creatures of the imagination. The actual peasants had endured the pangs of famine with scarcely a spurt of resistance. They had been taught by O'Connell that armed resistance to authority was justifiable under no circumstances; while they were perishing in every county in the island they were still taught that submission was their duty, and they submitted and died. Pauper alms carried to their homes, pauper works, which even to their eyes were worthless, further demoralised them, till the spirit of manhood was almost extinct. Mitchel had never been in Munster or seen the peasants on whom we were bid to rely, and his sincere patriotism and courage were not fortified by practical capacity or the inestimable faculty of knowing what can be accomplished. In all his public career, which from this time till his death, more than thirty years later, was conducted in the sunshine, it will be impossible to find one practical suggestion of any value. Of eloquence and enthusiasm he had much, but of the capacity which measures the sure road to success in any enterprise not a scintilla.
If we made this experiment which he approved, at what a prodigious cost we must make it? Not only O'Brien's hope of winning the gentry must be abandoned; that was little; but O'Brien himself and the cultivated classes represented by Ferguson and O'Loghlen, who governed themselves by judgment and conscience, and whose aim was to revive the entire Irish nation, would certainly leave us. We should have broken faith with our friends of every degree, and the lesson of integrity and veracity, which we had taught as guiding maxims to the new generation would have lost their meaning. Without the men of mind, success in reviving the Irish nation was entirely impossible; without that class no successful revolution had ever been made. In America, in France, in Greece, and in Belgium men, trained to think, stood at the head of the revolution, and brought it brains and guidance. A rising of peasants, or of an urban populace, was like a fire made of brambles and shavings; it speedily burnt itself out. And the case was not one which admitted of compromise; if the policy did not lead to success it led to speedy and cer-
