petty panels, controlled prisons, and received the circuit judges in the "gap of the North." I was kept informed of what was being done, and in the Press was able to speak of the case with exact knowledge and complete sympathy.[1]
My duties on a daily paper, which never altogether ceased day or night, were very trying. My deliverance from this slavery came to me in this way. There was a lively movement among political parties in Ulster; the Belfast Conservatives had induced Isaac Butt, a Professor of Political Economy in Trinity College, and editor of the Dublin University Magazine, to conduct a new Conservative journal for them, and the Catholics of Newry had been fortunate enough to secure the aid of Thomas O'Hagan to write
- ↑ I must not omit to note that my work was performed in constant ill-health, probably arising from indigestion, but which I confounded with consumption, the disease of which my mother died. Sir Dominick Corrigan, an eminent Dublin physician, who entered Parliament late in life, and who was very much awake to what was going on throughout the world, wrote me a letter thirty years later, which recalls my condition in 1838 better than my memory of it:—
"4, Merrion Square, West, Dublin,
"April 16, 1872."My dear Chief Secretary, You will probably not recollect me, but I never can forget the incident of our first meeting many years ago when you were hard at work on the Press here, and when I was hard at work at my profession.
"You asked me, and that was the purport of your visit, were you going into consumption, that if you were you would work work while you had life to add something more to the little capital you had laid by for your sister, that if you were not you would make an ambitious move, I think you said to ' The Bar,' and you added that on my answer depended your choice of life. It was an anxious moment for me as well as for you. I did not hesitate. I told you you were not on the way to consumption, and thank God my prediction has been true, and you have lived to be the chosen of Victoria, and Victoria is really my debtor, for to me she owes the gain of you.
"I too, like you, have laboured, and Dublin has fully rewarded me, and flattered me, for born within her walls, taught at her schools, and passing my life among the people, she has chosen me as her representative, and I now sit for her in the House of Commons.
"If you were among us now I think you would pity us. We have no master mind like O'Connell of yore. We have at one time some Fenians fancying they are to liberate the country. They furnish enough informers to hang or shoot the others. … I am sure it is time for me to have done, and all I can do is to apologise to you for thus trespassing on your time, and to say that I have no excuse to offer for it but the recollection of old times and the hope that if we do not soon ourselves improve here, we have at least the consolation of seeing good from our blood in Australia. Believe me, faithfully yours,
"D. J. CORRIGAN.'
