it would take a lecture to itself. I may say, however, in the words of Sir Gavan Duffy, that O'Connell's case rested on two main propositions :

1. "Ireland was fit for fit for legislative independence in position, population, and natural advantages. Five independent Kingdoms in Europe possessed less territory or people; and her station in the Atlantic, between the old world and the new, designed her to be the entrepôt of both, if the watchful jealousy of England had not rendered her natural advantages nugatory.

2. "She was entitled to legislative independence; the Parliament of Ireland was as ancient as the Parliament of England, and had not derived its existence from any Charter of the British Crown, but sprang out of the natural

rights of freemen. Its independence, long claimed, was finally recognised and confirmed by solemn compact between the two nations in 1782; that compact has since been shamefully violated, indeed, but no statute of limitation ran against the rights of a nation."*

The Repeal movement was, of course, thoroughly constitutional. "Give us back," said O'Connell, "the Parliament of which you robbed us forty years ago, and we will close the account." "There is nothing so safe," said John Bright, "as public meetings." The Repeal movement was a movement of public meetings. Everything was done in the light of open day. And yet how was O'Connell treated for making a demand, mark you, practically the same * Young Ireland.

as that made by Mr. Gladstone in our own day? He was indicted for seditious conspiracy. It looks like a joke that O'Connell, who did all things in the open, should have been indicted for conspiracy. It is, however, a grave fact. And how was he tried? O'Connell's trial was the scandal of the age. "" The most eminent Catholic in the Empire," says

Sir Gavan Duffy,

"" a man whose name was familiar to every Catholic in the world, was placed upon his trial in the Catholic metropolis of a Catholic country before four judges and twelve jurors, among whom there was not a single Catholic." Of course, O'Connell was found guilty and sent to jail.

But the infamy of the trial was too much even for the English House of Lords. The conviction was quashed, the

trial was practically condemned as "a mockery, a delusion and a snare," and O'Connell was set free. But the Repeal movement was put down by brute force. Out of the Repeal movement sprang the Young Ireland movement. I cannot go into the history of that movement either. I refer you again to Sir Gavan Duffy's books, Young Ireland, Four Years of Irish History, The Life of Thomas Davis. The "Young Irelanders" began as constitutional agitators. Their demand, like O'Connell's, was simply for the restoration of the Irish Parliament. But they gradually drifted into revolution and the rising of 1848 was the result.

But before '48 came, the work of the Young Irelanders was done. In their famous organ-The Nation-they revived the memory and the teachings of Wolfe

Tone; and the seed they sowed blossomed into fruit in the Fenian organisation. Young Ireland was the child of Repeal ; Fenianism was the child of Young Ireland.

The rising of '48 was, as you know, quickly put down; but the spirit of the nation-though a terrible famine had swept over the land, decimating the people-remained unsubdued. I will not linger over the ghastly story of this famine, nor of the incapacity shown by the Government in dealing with it, nor of the horrible evictions by which it was followed. I will only say, that three years after the famine the population of Ireland, which three years before the famine was over eight millions, sank to six millions and a half.

In 1850, an agitation for the reform