CHAPTER IV
CONTROVERSY WITH JOHN MITCHEL
His mis-statements and slanders; their refutation.
While we were engaged in this struggle to save the Irish race from destruction and Ireland from becoming a grazing farm for absentee landlords a new trouble appeared. John Mitchel, who had escaped from Van Diemen's Land and arrived in the United States, established a newspaper called the Citizen at New York, and plunged into Irish affairs. What patriotic Irishmen ought to do with the Tenant League, he declared, was to renounce and repudiate it. "Nothing would ever be obtained for the tenant farmers from the British Parliament; their best hope was an Irish expedition from the United States with arms in their hands, which might be expected, perhaps, before another year had elapsed." Many generous young Irishmen gladly accepted these promises. It would be so much better to welcome our brethren from America with arms in their hands than to petition an insolent and unsympathetic Parliament in London.
It is no longer necessary to invite the judgment of posterity on that policy. Two generations have since lived and died; all the League demanded has been won from Parliament, and the expedition which Mr. Mitchel was expected to lead never set out; neither the Crimean War, the Indian Mutiny, the heat between England and France, which at one time threatened an explosion, nor the Fenian organisation in the United States, having furnished the opening for which he
67
