the measures which the occasion required. Feuds in the National Party ought to end at once. It was only through unanimity and the enthusiasm of a whole nation that we could hope to succeed, and they must be got at all price. It was not difficult, I hoped, for Ireland was electrified by the tidings that every post brought from the Continent of insurrection against misgovernment, and what was impossible yesterday seemed possible and apparently easy to-day. The whole of the Confederate leaders in town agreed to this policy.[1]
Sir Colinan O'Loghlen and Dr. Gray undertook to obtain a conference of the Old Irelanders, and I agreed to move in the Confederation that Mitchel and any who retired with him should be invited to return, and Dillon suggested that he and I should have a conference with Mitchel on ways and means. The Confederate leaders were of opinion that the occasion was as propitious as we could ever hope it to be. Pius IX. at that time stood at the head of a movement for wise and moderate reforms throughout Europe, and the Catholic Church in Ireland and elsewhere might be counted on to move with him. The English Government were at the moment engaged in negotiations with Naples to obtain for Sicily the identical concessions Ireland was asking for herself, and it might be assumed that it only needed an impulse sufficiently peremptory to induce her to concede to Ireland what she urged Naples to concede to Sicily. In England
- ↑ O'Brien delayed coming to town from a determination to allow the Confederates to choose their own course, but he protracted this generous reserve to a dangerous extreme, and I besought him to come to the Council without delay. "There will be an outburst sooner or later, be sure of that, but unless you provide against it, it will be. a mere democratic one, which the English Government will extinguish in blood. Or if, by a miracle, it succeeds, it will mean death and exile to the middle as well as the upper classes. As Ireland lies under my eye now I see but one safety for her—a union of the Old and Young Irelanders, an arraying of the middle class in the front of the millions, and a peaceful revolution, attained by watching and seizing our opportunity. By peaceful I mean without unnecessary or anarchical bloodshed. It may be won without a shot being fired. But trust me, if there is no such junction, and if things are let to take the course they are tending towards, we will see the life of the country trampled out under the feet of English soldiers, suppressing a peasant insurrection; or you and I will meet on a Jacobin scaffold, ordered for execution as enemies of some new Marat or Robespierre, Mr. James Lalor, or Mr. Somebody else. It is the fixed and inevitable course of revolutions when the strength of the middle classes is permitted to waste in inaction."—"Cahirmoyle Correspondence" (Duffy to O'Brien).
