[1823-1838 A.D.] movement an energy it had not before possessed. Himself a Catholic of birth and genius, unfairly kept back in the race of life, he devoted his heart and soul to the cause, and his character and antecedents made him the champion who ultimately assured its triumph. Having no sympathy with the rule of "the Saxon," he saw clearly how weak was the hold of the government and the Protestant caste on the vast mass of the Catholic nation; having a firm faith in the influence of his church, he perceived that it might be made an instrument of immense political power in Ireland; and, having attained a mastery over the lawyer's craft, he knew how a great popular movement might be so conducted as to elude the law and yet be in the highest degree formidable.

With these convictions he formed the bold design of combining the Irish Catholic millions under the superintendence of the native priesthood into a vast league against the existing order of things, and of wresting the concession of the Catholic claims from every opposing party in the state by an agitation, continually kept up, and embracing almost the whole of the people, but maintained within constitutional limits, though menacing and shaking the frame of society. He gradually succeeded in carrying out his purpose: Catholic associations, at first small, but slowly assuming larger proportions, were formed in different parts of the country; attempts of the government and of the local authorities to put them down were skilfully baffled by legal devices of many kinds; and at last, after a conflict of years, all Catholic Ireland was arrayed to a man in an organisation of enormous power that demanded its rights with no uncertain voice.

O'Connell, having long before attained an undisputed and easy ascendency, stood at the head of this great national movement; but it will be observed that, having been controlled from first to last by himself and the priesthood, it had little in common with the mob rule and violence which he had never ceased to regard with aversion. His election to parliament for Clare in 1828 proved the forerunner of the inevitable change, and the Catholic claims were granted the next year to the intense regret of the Protestant Irish, by a government avowedly hostile to the last, but unable to withstand the overwhelming pressure of a people united to insist on justice. The result, unquestionably, was almost wholly due to the energy and genius of a single man, though the Catholic question would have been settled, in all probability, in the course of time; and it must be added that O'Connell's triumph, which showed what agitation could effect in Ireland, was far from doing his country unmixed good.

O'CONNELL'S LATER CAREER

O'Connell joined the whigs on entering parliament, and gave effective aid to the cause of reform. The agitation, however, on the Catholic question had quickened the sense of the wrongs of Ireland, and the Irish Catholics were engaged ere long in a crusade against tithes and the established church, the most offensive symbols of their inferiority in the state. It may be questioned whether O'Connell was not rather led than a leader in this; the movement, at least, passed beyond his control, and the country for many months was terrorised by scenes of appalling crime and bloodshed. Lord Grey, very properly, proposed measures of repression to put this anarchy down, and O'Connell opposed them with extreme vehemence, a seeming departure from his avowed principles, but natural in the case of a proper tribune. This caused a breach between him and the whigs; but he gradually returned to his alle

[1838-1844 A.D.]

giance to them when they practically abolished Irish tithes, cut down the revenues of the established church, and endeavoured to secularise the surplus.

By this time O'Connell had attained a position of great eminence in the house of commons: as a debater he stood in the very first rank, though he had entered St. Stephen's after fifty; and his oratory, massive and strong in argument, although often scurrilous and coarse, and marred by a bearing in which cringing flattery and rude bullying were strangely blended, made a powerful, if not a pleasing, impression. O'Connell steadily supported Lord Melbourne's government in its policy of advancing Irish Catholics to places of trust and power in the state, though personally he refused a high judicial office. Though a strict adherent of the creed of Rome, he was a liberal, nay a radical, as regards measures for the vindication of human liberty. His conservatism was most apparent in his antipathy to socialistic doctrines and his tenacious regard for the claims of property. He actually opposed the Irish Poor Law, as encouraging a communistic spirit; he declared a movement against rent a crime; and, though he had a strong sympathy with the Irish peasant, and advocated a reform of his precarious tenure, it is difficult to imagine that he could have approved the cardinal principle of the Irish Land Act, the judicial adjustment of rent by the state.

O'Connell changed his policy as regards Ireland when Peel became minister in 1841. He declared that a tory régime in his country was incompatible with good government, and he began an agitation for the repeal of the union. One of his motives in taking this course, no doubt, was a strong personal dislike of Peel, with whom he had often been in collision, and who had singled him out in 1829 for what must be called a marked affront. O'Connell, nevertheless, was sincere and even consistent in his conduct: he had denounced the union in early manhood as an obstacle to the Catholic cause; he had spoken against the measure in parliament; he believed that the claims of Ireland were set aside or slighted in what he deemed an alien assembly; and, though he had ceased for some years to demand repeal, and regarded it as rather a means than an end, he was throughout life an avowed repealer. It should be observed, however, that in his judgment the repeal of the union would not weaken the real bond between Great Britain and Ireland; and he had nothing in common with the rebellious faction who, at a later period, openly declared for the separation of the two countries by force.

The organisation (the Catholic Association) which had effected such marvellous results in 1828-1829 was recreated for the new project. Enormous meetings, convened by the priesthood and directed or controlled by O'Connell, assembled in 1842-1843, and probably nine-tenths of the Irish Catholics were unanimous in the cry for repeal. O'Connell seems to have thought success certain; but he had not perceived the essential difference between his earlier agitation and this. The enlightened opinion of the three kingdoms for the most part approved the Catholic claims, and as certainly it condemned repeal. After some hesitation Peel resolved to put down the repeal movement. A vast intended meeting was proclaimed unlawful, and O'Connell was arrested and held to bail with ten or twelve of his principal followers. He was convicted after the trials that followed, but they were not good specimens of equal justice, and the sentence was reversed by the house of lords, with the approbation of competent judges.

The spell, however, of O'Connell's power had vanished; his health had suffered much from a short confinement; he was verging upon his seventieth year, and he was alarmed and pained by the growth of a party in the repeal ranks who scoffed at his views and advocated the revolutionary doctrines

[1845-1867 A.D.] which he had always feared and abhorred. Before long famine had fallen on the land, and under this visitation the repeal movement, already paralysed, wholly collapsed. O'Connell died soon afterwards, on the 15th of May, 1847, at Genoa, whilst on his way to Rome, profoundly afflicted by his country's misery, and by the failure of his late high hopes, yet soothed in dying by sincere sympathy, felt throughout Ireland and largely in Europe, and expressed even by political foes. He was a remarkable man in every sense of the word; Catholic Ireland calls him her "liberator" still; and history will say of him that, with some failings, he had many and great gifts, that he was an orator of a high order, and that, agitator as he was, he possessed the wisdom, the caution, and the tact of a real statesman.

The national system of education introduced in 1833 was the real recantation of intolerant opinions, but the economic state of Ireland was fearful. The famine, emigration, and the new Poor Law had nearly got rid of starvation, but the people had not become frankly loyal, for they felt that they owed more to their own importunity, to their own misfortunes, than to the wisdom. of their rulers. The efforts of young Ireland eventuated in another rebellion (1848); a revolutionary wave could not roll over Europe without touching the unlucky island. After the failure of that wretched outbreak there was peace until the close of the American Civil War released a number of adventurers trained to the use of arms and filled with hatred to England.

FENIANISM

Already in 1858 the discovery of the Phoenix conspiracy had shown that the policy of Mitchel and his associates was not forgotten. John O'Mahony, one of the men of '48, organised a formidable secret society in America, which his historical studies led him to call the Fenian brotherhood. The money raised in the United States was perhaps not less than £80,000, but it is due to O'Mahony to say that he died poor. In Ireland the chief direction of the conspiracy was assumed by James Stephens, who had been implicated in the Phoenix affair, and who never cordially agreed with O'Mahony. Stephens was very despotic-a true revolutionary leader. As in all Irish political conspiracies there were traitors in the camp, who kept the authorities well informed, and in September, 1865, the Irish People newspaper, which had been the organ of the movement, was suddenly suppressed by the government. The arrests of Luby, O'Leary, and O'Donovan Rossa followed, all of whom, with many others, were afterwards prosecuted to conviction. Stephens for a time eluded the police, living with little concealment in a villa near Dublin, and apparently occupied in gardening. But in November he was identified and captured, much evidence being found in his house. Ten days afterwards he escaped from Richmond prison, and it is now known that some of the warders were Fenians.

The promptitude of the government perhaps prevented a general insurrection, but there was a partial outbreak in February and March, 1867, chiefly in Kerry, Limerick, and Tipperary. The police, who behaved extremely well, were often attacked, but the Fenians abstained from plunder or from any acts which might estrange the rural population. The peasants, however, though for the most part nationalists, did not care to risk their lives in such a wild enterprise, and the young men of the towns furnished the only real force. Weather of extraordinary severity, which will long be remembered as the "Fenian winter," completed their discomfiture, and they suffered fearful hardships. There was enough sympathy with the movement to procure

[1867-1881 A.D.]

the election of O'Donovan Rossa for Tipperary in 1867, when he was actually undergoing penal servitude. John Mitchel, whose old sentence was unreversed, was chosen by the same constituency as late as 1875, but in neither case was the vote a large one. It became the fashion in Ireland to celebrate annually the obsequies of the "Manchester martyrs," as the three Fenians were called who suffered death for the murder of Police-sergeant Brett. The Roman Catholic church has always opposed secret societies, and some priests had the firmness to discountenance these political funerals, but strong popular excitement in Ireland has generally been beyond clerical control. Even as late as 1879 the Fenian spirit was not extinct, and one of the brotherhood, named Devoy, announced a new departure in January of that year.

The Fenian movement disclosed much discontent, and was attended by criminal outrages in England. The abolition of the Irish church establishment, which had long been condemned by public opinion, was then decreed (1869). The land question was next taken in hand (1870). These reforms did not, however, put an end to Irish agitation. The Home Rule party, which demanded the restoration of a separate Irish parliament, showed increased activity, and the general election of 1874 gave it a strong representation at Westminster, where one section of the party developed into the "Obstructionists." Bad seasons and distress among the peasantry (18781880) added force to the Land League, and agrarian outrages increased to an alarming extent on the expiration of the Peace Preservation Act and the rejection by the lords of a bill temporarily limiting evictions. In 1881 a Coercion act was passed, and was immediately followed by a new Land act of large scope.

BRIEF REFERENCE-LIST OF AUTHORITIES BY CHAPTERS

[The letter a is reserved for Editorial Matter.]

CHAPTER I. EARLY HISTORY AND THE ANGLO-NORMAN Conquest

W. K. SULLIVAN, article on "Ireland" in the Encyclopædia Britannica.— J. A. FROUDE, The English in Ireland.-d W. BASIL JONES, Vestiges of the Gael in Gwynedd.- BEDE, Ecclesiastical History.- A. G. RICHEY, Short History of the Irish People.— J. H. BURTON, History of Scotland. ANNALS OF THE FOUR MASTERS.-WILLIAM OF MALMESBURY, De Gestis Rerum Anglorum.— GIRALDUS CAMBRENSIS, Topographia Hiberniæ.-C. MACFARLANE AND T. THOMSON, Comprehensive History of England.-J. H. RAMSAY, The Foundations of England. -m JOCELIN, Life of St. Patrick.- WAR OF THE GÆDHIL WITH THE GAILL.-J. J. A. WORSAAE, Account of the Danes and Norwegians in England, Scotland and Ireland.

CHAPTER II. IRELAND UNDER ENGLISH RULE

¿R. BAGWELL, article on "Ireland" in the Encyclopædia Britannica.-J. LINGARD, History of England. -d P. W. JOYCE, Concise History of Ireland.-J. FROISSART, Chronicles.— A. G. RICHEY, History of the Irish People.- - ANNALS OF THE FOUR MASTERS.-R. BAGWELL, Ireland Under the Tudors.-HARLEIAN MISCELLANY.-E. SPENSER, View of the State of Ireland.-C. MACFARLANE AND T. THOMSON, Comprehensive History of England.-'STATE PAPERS OF HENRY THE VIII, The State of Ireland and the Plans for its Reformation.- C. KNIGHT, History of England. — NARRATIVES OF THE CONTESTS IN IRELAND (Camden Soc. Pub.). - EARL OF CLARENDON, History of the Rebellion.-P GOLDWIN SMITH, Irish History and Irish Character.-9 W. O'CONNOR MORRIS, article on "Daniel O'Connell" in the Encyclopædia Britannica.- ROBERT REDMAN, Vita Henrici V.- LIBELL OF ENGLISHE POLICIE. T. KEIGHTLEY, History of England.-T. CARLYLE, Cromwell's Letters and Speeches.—" T. B. MACAULAY, History of England.— MATTHEW PARIS, Chronica.— JOHN DAVIES, A Discourse Why Ireland Has Never Been Entirely Subdued.